The Disaffected Lib

Stephen Harper's performance before the Conservative parliamentary caucus this morning spoke volumes for the integrity and sense of raw power and privilege of what passes for a prime minister in Canada today.

Harper played victim and complained about how he was very upset at the conduct of certain Parliamentarians (i.e. Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau) and how he'd been let down by his own Prime Minister's Office.

Having, like Pilate, washed his hands of the affair, Harper demanded  the Senate reform itself forthwith, clean up its act, put an end to these transgressions.

But what exactly had the Senate actually done that was particularly egregious?  Nothing.   A few of its members may have fudged their expense accounts and claims but it was the actions of the Senate that brought that out.  It was the Senate that called in outside auditors.  It was the Senate that ordered an investigation.

And, once the Senate had taken these steps to cleanse its own house, what did Stephen Joseph Harper's very own PMO do?  Why top officials in the PMO brought Mike Duffy's problems in-house.  The bribed Duffy with cash to reimburse the Senate accounts.  Harper's office did that, not the Senate.  Then they moved to thwart the Senate's investigation, ordering Duffy to say nothing to the independent auditors and spurn their requests for cooperation.  Harper's office did that, not the Senate.  And then they moved to strongarm the Senate audit committee to launder the report into Senator Duffy's difficulties.  Harper's office did that, not the Senate.

In fact, almost all of the real corruption in this scandal emanated from Harper and his closest aides (or just his aides if you believe in the Easter Bunny and the claims that Harper had no knowledge of any of this).   That's where the corruption is, within Stephen Harper and his office.   So it's a little rich when the Great Corrupter points fingers at the Senate and demands they reform.

This greasy bait and switch is an integral party of Harper's determination to regain control of this scandal.  He's determined to roll this scandal back from the PMO and into Duffy's lap because he knows if he doesn't turn this around, the scandal is heading straight for him.

Curious there was not the slightest mention today of reforming the Prime Minister's Office.  That speaks volumes for what is truly at play here.

Nix "Duffygate," trash "Senategate," this is "HarperGate" and that's what the opposition needs to hammer away at.

Heritage minister James Moore is said to be en route to Prince Edward Island to demand Duffy's resignation.   That has to be part and parcel of rolling this scandal back out of the PMO and straight into the lap of a safely-resigned former senator where the opposition will be left to pick on a carcass.

Harper signalled that would be the approach in his remarks this morning.  Oh he was so deeply upset that these bad people had betwayed him.   Bad people, bad people.  So many disappointments.  Poor prime minister.   So sad.  No room for the likes of Duffy, not in Steve's government.   Bad Duffy, bad.  Poor Steve.

That is, however, the narrative Steve has chosen to fall back on, the story he plans to sell through the summer.  He has to get the focus turned around, back on Duffy, and keep it from heading toward Sussex Drive.   Stephen Harper has to regain control of this scandal.

If the opposition falls for it, Stephen Harper wins and they lose, big time.  If they focus on Duffy instead of what happened inside the PMO and why, they lose.   They need to hammer away on the cheque and the letter of understanding.   They need to keep the spotlight on Wright, on Perrin and directly on Steve Harper.  They need to make the Canadian public realize the stink isn't coming from Friendly Lane but from right inside the PMO.

When you're in opposition to a guy like Harper you won't be getting many opportunities like this one.   They cannot afford to waste it.

Word has it that Harper minister and loyalist, James Moore, has been dispatched to P.E.I. to demand that the Cavendish Cottager resign his senate seat.

Will Duffy call the cops on another intruder?

Does Harper's envoy come bearing parting gifts?   Oh to be a fly on the wall.

This began with a scandal about Mike Duffy and a cottage on Friendly Lane in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.  Suddenly that seems like so long ago, an eon.

Duffy, Duffy who?

Now the scandal has shot straight up the food chain, ricocheting around the Senate and on into the PMO.  And the path is littered with the bodies - Duffy, Pam Wallin, Nigel Wright and now, seemingly, Benjamin Perrin, Harper legal counsel.   Now the scandal has kept on going, right into Mr. Harper's private office, right to his very throne.

Thanks to some dissident, insurgent if you will, probably from the ranks of Harper's own Parliamentary caucus, we have learned a lot over just the past week.   We have learned about a curious cash payment, secret deals, a laundered Senate report, and improbable, hopelessly feeble denials by a prime minister and his chief of staff reeling from the revelations that were never supposed to be.

We know a lot but how much really?   This whole Duffy deal was a potentially high risk business by people who are expert at understanding risk.   They knew what it would mean for them if their transactions ever surfaced in public.

There were no end of ways to get Duffy a paltry, for them, $90,000.  Why a personal cheque from Harper's chief of staff?  Why drag Harper's Special Counsel in on this?  Obviously there was a need to bring this "in-house", to keep it under wraps and that meant under the direct control of the prime minister and his top advisers.

Why the added inducement of rigging the Senate audit report, the promise that the report would "go easy on" the Cavendish Cottager?   That's a real "deal sweetener."  It's a promise to corrupt the workings of a committee of the Senate of Canada.   And now we know that is precisely what happened.

Duffy isn't and never was worth this risk.   No, very important people don't take these risks to bail out some lowly senator.  It's a pretty safe bet that they weren't doing this to protect Michael Dennis Duffy of Prince Edward Island.   This was about protecting Stephen Joseph Harper.  From what?  We don't know, not yet.  Maybe never.

But I would bet the farm that Mike Duffy knows and that Stephen Harper and his closest aides know what Mike Duffy knows and that's why they deemed it critical to bring the Duffy expense scandal in-house and ensure the Senate audit report gave Duffy a soft landing.

Harper knows from experience that we're a dull and generally unquestioning lot with a collective attention span often not much greater than that of lesser primates.   And he knows that he's almost made it to summer, the season of scandal salvation.  He's betting he can hold his breath longer than we can and he knows from past experience that's not a bad bet.

Update - Well, there it is, the summer narrative.   Stephen Harper is sticking with "I didn't know".  Nope, he's outright indignant and has told his caucus that he's "very upset" with the conduct of people in the prime minister's office and some parliamentarians.  And now, kids, sorry but I have to run.  I have a plane to catch to Rio.

In February, when the Wright-Duffy cheque scheme was hatched, two of Harper's closest aides were Nigel Wright, Chief of Staff, and Benjamin Perrin, Special Counsel and personal legal advisor to the prime minister.

At First, Two
Lawyer Nigel Wright, holder of two law degrees, one from Harvard, somehow decides to cut Duffy a $90,000 cheque on a "spur of the moment" brain fart and completely overlooks the Rules of the Senate, the Parliament of Canada Act and the Criminal Code, all of which the deal seems to violate.

And Then There Were ThreeLawyer Wright then goes to lawyer Perrin, Mr. Harper's personal lawyer, to have Perrin draft the letter of understanding setting out the terms of the payment.   Lawyer Perrin who is also a seconded professor from the UBC law faculty, likewise misses entirely the Rules of the Senate, the Parliament of Canada Act and the Criminal Code implications of the deal he's facilitating.

The kicker, however, is lawyer Perrin's lawyer-client relationship with his most important client ever, Stephen Joseph Harper.  He's the legal handmaiden of the prime minister but he's going to go ahead and make this dodgy deal happen without breathing a word to that client?  He's going to purposely go out of his way to conceal this from his client, the prime minister?  He's going to breach the most fundamental professional responsibility he has to Stephen J. Harper?


B*U*L*L*S*H*I*T

Here's the skinny.  Without Harper's full knowledge and consent (or direction), lawyer Wright would never have engaged lawyer Perrin and without Harper's full knowledge and approval, lawyer Perrin would never have touched this dodgy business.  Harper didn't know?  No, that has collapsed under its own weight at this point.   And that means, if there was really any doubt, the web now has Stephen Harper snagged.

To recap.  Two of Harper's most intimate aides and advisors were in on this, had ethical and legal responsibilities to the prime minister and yet supposedly went behind Harper's back and concealed this from him.  Sorry kids, that cements it.  Wright's in, Perrin's in and beyond any reasonable doubt, Stephen Harper is in - right up to his neck.

Now I'm even more comfortable with my Senate insurgency theory.  Whoever is driving this acted knowing that Stephen Harper was already trapped.  They had the smoking gun, they had a drawer full of them.  They knew about the cheque.  They knew about Wright.  They knew about the laundered Senate report.  And they knew that it wasn't just Wright but Wright and Perrin.   And because of the cheque, the chief of staff, the laundered report and Stephen Harper's personal lawyer - because of that combination of those details - they knew Stephen Harper was utterly trapped.   Since this began they've been pushing on an open door.

It's no wonder the Conservatives have fallen as silent as a funeral parlour at midnight.

Nigel Wright continues to be Stephen Harper's moat and drawbridge in the Duffy affair.

Steve says he knew nothing about the $90,000 gift via a personal cheque from Wright to the Cavendish Cottager and Wright backs him up.   Even though Wright has resigned and his story about Harper being in the dark is, well, more than implausible, Wright's word still carries some weight.

Maybe not so much after all.   Wright has some major credibility problems with the dodgy story he's spun so far.   In particular, Wright's story of how he came to write the cheque is full of holes.  According to Harper's former Chief of Staff, it was an impulse gesture, a "spur of the moment" thing.   No, sorry Nigel, it was anything but spur of the moment.

There was actually a fairly elaborate process, involving lawyers on both sides negotiating terms and conditions, that pretty much shatters Nigel's "spur of the moment" claim and, with it, the remainder of his integrity and Harper's.

Nigel didn't just slip Duffy a cheque.   He had Stephen Harper's former special counsel and legal advisor, Benjamin Perrin, draft the "letter of understanding" that set out the terms of the deal between Wright and Duffy.

Harper and Special Counsel Perrin Perrin, currently an associate professor at UBC's law faculty, isn't answering speaking to reporters.   Quelle surprise!  Imagine the questions he might be asked.   For example, he might be asked what he thought of the deal in reference to Section 17(1) of the Senate Conflict of Interest Code, or Section 16(1) of the Parliament of Canada Act, or Section 121(1) of the Criminal Code of Canada?

And, given that he's not a mere lawyer but a law professor and the prime minister's former special counsel and legal advisor, just what in hell was he doing facilitating a deal that seems to run afoul of all three enactments even to the point of possibly being criminal?

Benny, what were you thinking?  By the way, exactly who was your client(s)?  Did you tell your client that this was a dodgy deal that could land him/them in big trouble if word leaked out?  And don't you know that lawyers aren't supposed to be doing this sort of thing and can even be made to answer for it?

Or was it a "spur of the moment" thing, Benny?

And so the web grows ever wider, ensnaring ever more characters.  Now we've got Stephen Harper's Chief of Staff and Stephen Harper's Special Counsel in on the Duffy cash scandal.  Who's next?  Who knows?  But don't worry, the prime minister knew absolutely nothing about any of this.

Robert Reich argues there's just one way remaining to wrest domination from global capitalism.   We need multinational tax policy to halt the excesses of multinational corporatism.

As global capital becomes ever more powerful, giant corporations are holding governments and citizens up for ransom — eliciting subsidies and tax breaks from countries concerned about their nation’s “competitiveness” — while sheltering their profits in the lowest-tax jurisdictions they can find. 
Major advanced countries — and their citizens — need a comprehensive tax agreement that won’t allow global corporations to get away with this. Google, Amazon, Starbucks, every other major corporation, and every big Wall Street bank, are sheltering as much of their U.S. profits abroad as they can, while telling Washington that lower corporate taxes are necessary in order to keep the U.S. “competitive.”
 Baloney. The fact is, global corporations have no allegiance to any country; their only objective is to make as much money as possible — and play off one country against another to keep their taxes down and subsidies up, thereby shifting more of the tax burden to ordinary people whose wages are already shrinking because companies are playing workers off against each other. 
Reich warns, however, that rightwing nationalist movements are spreading throughout North America and Europe, thwarting the very prospect of cooperative multinational action and thereby delivering us straight into the hands of multinational, global corporatism.

 Writer, war correspondent, religious scholar, Chris Hedges has become increasingly radicalized over the past dozen or so years although he would argue it's society that has truly changed, particularly through the influence of religious fundamentalism and the capture of political power by the forces of corporatism.  Whatever the balance of changes and forces, he's calling for revolution as the last hope.

Corporations write our legislation. They control our systems of information. They manage the political theater of electoral politics and impose our educational curriculum. They have turned the judiciary into one of their wholly owned subsidiaries. They have decimated labor unions and other independent mass organizations, as well as having bought off the Democratic Party, which once defended the rights of workers. With the evisceration of piecemeal and incremental reform—the primary role of liberal, democratic institutions—we are left defenseless against corporate power.

A handful of corporate oligarchs around the globe have everything—wealth, power and privilege—and the rest of us struggle as part of a vast underclass, increasingly impoverished and ruthlessly repressed. There is one set of laws and regulations for us; there is another set of laws and regulations for a power elite that functions as a global mafia.  

We stand helpless before the corporate onslaught. There is no way to vote against corporate power. Citizens have no way to bring about the prosecution of Wall Street bankers and financiers for fraud, military and intelligence officials for torture and war crimes, or security and surveillance officers for human rights abuses. The Federal Reserve is reduced to printing money for banks and financiers and lending it to them at almost zero percent interest; corporate officers then lend it to us at usurious rates as high as 30 percent. I do not know what to call this system. It is certainly not capitalism. Extortion might be a better word. The fossil fuel industry, meanwhile, relentlessly trashes the ecosystem for profit. The melting of 40 percent of the summer Arctic sea ice is, to corporations, a business opportunity. Companies rush to the Arctic and extract the last vestiges of oil, natural gas, minerals and fish stocks, indifferent to the death pangs of the planet.

...The airy promises of the market economy have, by now, all been exposed as lies. The ability of corporations to migrate overseas has decimated our manufacturing base. It has driven down wages, impoverishing our working class and ravaging our middle class. It has forced huge segments of the population—including those burdened by student loans—into decades of debt peonage. It has also opened the way to massive tax shelters that allow companies such as General Electric to pay no income tax. Corporations employ virtual slave labor in Bangladesh and China, making obscene profits. As corporations suck the last resources from communities and the natural world, they leave behind ...horrific human suffering and dead landscapes. The greater the destruction, the greater the apparatus crushes dissent.

More than 100 million Americans—one-third of the population—live in poverty or a category called “near poverty.” Yet the stories of the poor and the near poor, the hardships they endure, are rarely told by a media that is owned by a handful of corporations—Viacom, General Electric, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Clear Channel and Disney. The suffering of the underclass, like the crimes of the power elite, has been rendered invisible. 

...It is time to build radical mass movements that defy all formal centers of power and make concessions to none. It is time to employ the harsh language of open rebellion and class warfare. It is time to march to the beat of our own drum. The law historically has been a very imperfect tool for justice, as African-Americans know, but now it is exclusively the handmaiden of our corporate oppressors; now it is a mechanism of injustice. It was our corporate overlords who launched this war. Not us. Revolt will see us branded as criminals. Revolt will push us into the shadows. And yet, if we do not revolt we can no longer use the word “hope.”   

Steve Harper's namesake nemesis, the Toronto Star's  Tim Harper, writes of a government known for its "in your face" bombast that has abruptly fallen silent.

...our governing party has collectively lost its voice.

The “accountability” government gave us the news that Pamela Wallin, the senator so loudly backed by Harper over alleged expense account abuses,had resigned from the Conservative caucus  by news release as the long weekend was beginning.
Then it pulled all its scheduled spokespersons off the Friday political talk shows.
The night before, Duffy announced his departure from the caucus, then had the RCMP remove inquiring reporters from the vicinity of his home.
Then Wright announced his resignation on a Sunday morning in the middle of the weekend, and a junior MP from Alberta, a loyal soldier named Michelle Rempel, became the face of the government on the Sunday political shows.
But Rempel spoke before Wright’s resignation. After his bombshell, no one from the government came forward to explain, apologize or defend.

Everybody, it seems, the whole lot of them have gone to ground.  They're not even trying to distract attention or change the subject.

Then again when you get a break from the frothy snarling of John Baird, the indignant pontificating of Jason Kenney or the slack-jawed scolding of Joe Oliver, it really is kind of nice.  Silence is Golden.

New research suggests mankind may avoid the very worst predicted impacts of climate change.   That same research concludes what is actually in store is devastating anyway.

"...the world is still likely to be in for a temperature rise of double that regarded as safe.

"The researchers said that warming was most likely to reach about 4C above pre-industrial levels if the past decade's readings were taken into account.

"That would still lead to catastrophe across large swaths of the Earth, causing droughts, storms, floods and heatwaves and with drastic effects on agricultural productivity leading to secondary effects such as mass migration."

What's unhelpful about this report is that it looks at climate change in isolation as though it is the measure of the threats facing our civilization.   Yet, to get a more helpful perspective you must add climate change impacts to these related and compounding factors:
resource depletion and exhaustion, especially the freshwater crisis; species extinction and migration. especially the collapse of global fisheries; deforestation; desertification; air, soil and water contamination of all forms; pest and disease migration; overpopulation and population migration; and the gamut of local and global security challenges including food insecurity; inequality; revolt; terrorism; climate wars and the growth of failed states; regional arms races, especially in south and east Asia; and nuclear proliferation.   There, that fleshes it out, don't you think?

Climate change is just one of the major challenges we will have to meet in the span of the next generation or two if we're to hold civilization together.  Each of the factors listed here, and it's not an exhaustive list, makes solving the others considerably more difficult and unlikely.   Each of these factors compounds the impacts some of the others.  It's this matrix that makes taking climate change in isolation of somewhat limited purpose and effect.

It's important to remember that, despite their invaluable research, climate change experts operate in a necessarily narrow focus that has no means of addressing the overall challenge.    They're not exaggerating their predictions of catastrophic impacts from the floods, the droughts, the severe storm events, heat waves and sea level rise or the resultant agricultural collapse and population migration, it's just that unfortunately this is only part of a much greater basket of problems, all of them more or less man-made,  that will confront us and, especially, our children and grandchildren.

I have tried to watch these events as they have unfolded over the last fifteen years (which is about when I became a believer) and I have been struck at how the greatest peril of all is us, ourselves.  The very worst failure has been our addiction to growth.   We depend on growth today and consider it cataclysmic if our economy shrinks ever just barely.

We see growth in its narrowest form - on an annual basis.  We look forward one year and look back one.  And our noses are so hard up against that tree that we have no hope of seeing the forest.

We have come to consider 3% annual growth in GDP the indicator of a healthy economy for the developed world. That 3% compounded over 50-years, a single useful adult life, comes out to something in the order of 438% effective growth. The economy has to become 4.4 times larger at the end of that single adult life than it was at the beginning. That means we need many times more fossil fuels, and other non-renewable and renewable resources alike. Here’s the eye opener. Pursue that 3% growth for a century and you need to grow your economy 19.22 times larger. Make that 150-years and you will have grown your economy 84.25 times larger. Round it out to two full centuries and your economy will be 369 times bigger than it was at the outset yet each year saw growth just 3% greater than the previous year.
But that’s impossible, isn’t it? Of course. Yet we are bound and will remain in hot pursuit of impossible, inevitably self-destructive objectives that will either blind us to alternatives or close off our opportunities to change even if we want to on some levels.
Logic dictates that, in a finite world, a single fixed biosphere, growth cannot be infinite nor can it be maintained with any stability past a certain point. As we near these limits we start to get buffeted by human shortcomings including inefficiency, waste, greed, distrust and manipulation (among others).  And that is precisely what we're experiencing now.
Forget the climate, we are the real catastrophe.   Our human nature and its powerful inertia are far more lethal than any storm nature can conjure up.

The Tories have a rich history of backstabbing.   Dalton Camp did in John Diefenbaker and was never forgiven.   Brian Mulroney shoved Joe Clark out of the way and into a ditch.   Could it be possible that the knives are coming out for Steve Harper in the finest Conservative tradition? 

Trying to make sense of what's been happening this week isn't easy.  On the surface, nothing seems to add up.  It has the confused improbability of palace intrigue.

Someone or some group on the inside is playing a high stakes game in which Stephen Harper may be the intended target.  Sure they're going through two of his most prominent Senate appointments, Mike Duffy and Pam Wallin, but that doesn't mean either of them are necessarily the target.   They could just be the means to a less obvious end.

The way Harper handled the Duffy problem suggests he saw himself as personally exposed.   Duffy was caught, sure, but he already had financing arranged through The Royal Bank.  Harper, however, had reason to bring that problem "in house."

He wanted it dealt with quickly and cleanly.   He wanted the problem to go away.  Forget about Duffy borrowing the money, give it to him with only a couple of strings attached.  He had to repay every dime in question and he had to stay clear of the auditors and remain silent.   The whole business was to be kept private, including the money trail.   That explains the personal cheque.

Those targeting Harper countered by feeding their media boy copies of Duffy's e-mails and details of the secret, private payment.  Duffy and Wright were forced to come clean and admit the curious transaction.

One other key element that was also leaked was that Duffy was promised that the senate inquiry would "go easy on" him.  So, when Duffy and the PMO said "debt repaid, nothing to see here"  Harper's foes released the original Senate committee report to show how the final report had been laundered just as Duffy said he had been promised.

Difficult as it may be to feel sympathy for Mike Duffy, it would seem that he has been used by Harper's dissidents and Harper himself and both have simply worsened the Cavendish Cottager's position.

So far all of the points have been scored by Harper's adversaries.  They have used a succession of well-timed leaks of e-mails, documents and information to keep Harper constantly on the defensive.   They have forced two key Harper senate appointees  out of caucus.   Best of all, they have forced Harper's most critical adviser, his powerful and brilliant Chief of Staff to resign in disgrace, leaving Harper isolated, vulnerable and under a very dark cloud.   Now a criminal investigation looms and it could go right to the top tier of the PMO.

This is a terrible position for a guy like Steve Harper to be in.  He's been an autocratic party leader.   He's not beloved, he's not even well liked.  There are plainly well positioned people who have been biding their time, waiting to get back at him.   A lot of his own people do not like how he has ruled the country, what Canada has become under the Harper regime.   Many of them were "progressive" Conservatives before Harper lurched to the hard right.

Could we be staring at a possible fracturing of the Alliance/PC entente?   Have the old school ProgCons had enough?   Are they preparing to move in for the kill?

All eyes should be squarely on Steve Harper in the coming weeks as he struggles to recapture his hold on power and vanquish these unnamed dissidents.

Stephen Harper knows he's got rats in the Conservative pantry and it must be giving him fits trying to figure out just who they are.

Somebody is leaking a steady stream of information, documents and e-mails to Bob Fife of CTV about Mike Duffy, Pam Wallin and Nigel Wright and who knows what or whom might be still to come.

Mike Duffy has taken refuge in his Cavendish cottage in P.E.I. and is quick to summon the police to clear off nosy journalists.   Harper is apparently in Peru although he's expected back to face down the Tory caucus on Tuesday morning.

This sounds like a settling of scores, a nascent civil war within the Tory senate caucus.  Perhaps it is the old guard, Progressive Conservatives, taking their revenge on the Harper upstarts, the new guard.   After all, when you look at the casualties so far - Brazeau, Duffy and Wallin, not to mention Nigel Wright - they were all handpicked by the prime minister.

This is too important to miss.  Read Miranda Holmes revealing look at Harper EnviroShill Peter Kent and his close personal ties to Canada's fossil fuelers.

This is eerily like the appointments during the Bush era.

It has always been my suspicion that Stephen Harper wanted to govern at least until he pushed through the Northern Gateway to get Athabasca bitumen flowing to Asia.

With no small degree of help from the New Democrats and Liberals, Harper has already achieved his overarching goal of moving Canada's political centre permanently to the right but it's the Northern Gateway he sees as his legacy.

To see that through Harper needs to cut some quick deal with Christy Clark, give the environmental review process a laxative, and move to steamroller the pipeline opposition, no matter the cost.  People in a rush expedite.   Foot hard on the pedal and a firm grip on the wheel.

Now there are troubling signs of bad road ahead.   That might well explain the bizarre goings on in Ottawa lately.   Steve Harper can't be distracted by troubles within his own caucus.   He needs them to go away, fast and at almost any cost.

Brazeau he could have handled.  Ditch the guy.  He wasn't an asset anyway.   Wallin?  Hard to say but, in any case, safe as in "non-threatening."   Duffy?  Different story entirely.

Some say Duffy was the hardest-working Tory senator, at least in his exertions on behalf of the Conservative Party.  He was in permanent campaign mode, criss-crossing Canada to star at fundraisers and campaign rallies.  He was a senator from Prince Edward Island in name only, doing what cottagers do, spending the summer recesses at his cottage there.  It was a residency bubble that was easily burst.

When the fit hit the shan, Sideshow Steve responded true to form trying to distance himself, using his closest aides to make it go away, ever ready and willing to throw human sacrifices under the political bus.

Duffy, accepting his fate, went off to The Royal Bank to negotiate a loan to repay his housing expenses.   For reasons that may only be known to Harper and his former chief of staff, Nigel Wright, a decision was taken to keep Duffy's financial situation "in house."  With that, Wright wrote Duffy a personal cheque to cover all the "expenses."   Apparently the cheque came with a direction for Duffy to dummy up and under no circumstances cooperate with the senate-appointed auditors.   None of this was ever to surface in public or even in private and nobody, Duffy or Wright, was to report any of the details to anyone no matter what was required.  The Mafia has a word for it, "omerta."

But somebody talked and began feeding Duffy's e-mails to CTV where Old Duff had burned his bridges on taking his senate appointment.  Another mystery.   Who so had it in for Duffy who was also privy to the senator's e-mails might have ratted him out to Bob Fife?


Some are pointing fingers at "old guard" Tories unhappy that Duffy, a lifelong Liberal turned Latter Day Tory, eclipsed them and stole so much credit for Harper's majority win in the last election.  Old Duff certainly hasn't been reluctant to throw his considerable weight around.  He might have made enemies inside as easily as he accumulated them outside.

This might have been where Harper stepped in to help out the guy who had worked so tirelessly for his success and rescue him from the backstabbers in his own upper chamber.  "Nigel, get Duffy a cheque.  Make it a gift.  Yeah, for the whole amount.   Make this all go away. And make sure no one's the wiser."

And it just might have worked if Duffy's rivals hadn't got their hands on his e-mail.   Suddenly the e-mail forced admissions that put Wright in the crosshairs which threatened the guy crouching immediately behind Wright, Stephen Joseph Harper.   Fortunately, for Harper, Wright was willing to take the bullet, allowing Steve to retreat to his office to "behave strangely."

People like Nigel Wright know the importance of words and precision.  It's often more important what isn't said than what is.  Here is how he put the Duffy payment.   “I did not advise the Prime Minister of the means by which Sen. Duffy’s expenses were repaid, either before or after the fact.”

What he's saying is that he didn't tell Harper "the means" by which Duffy's expenses were covered but that doesn't mean that Harper didn't know, well in advance, that Duffy was to be paid somehow.  And it doesn't say that Wright did this of his own volition instead of at the direction of Stephen Harper.   All it says is that Wright didn't tell Steve he was writing a personal cheque to cover the funds.

So, where does this leave Duffy?   Some say he's got the goods on the Tory Senate establishment that stabbed him in the back.   So, while he may be out of the Tory Caucus, he's not inclined to go anywhere and they can't force him out either without falling on their own swords.

As for Harper, he seems to have lost control of the narrative, not to mention his unruly senate caucus.  It's rumoured Steve will prorogue Parliament in the coming weeks, perhaps to get a summer recess to let scandal die and to herd his senate cats back into their pen.

Some speculate Steve might go for the same play that took out Ignatieff - a long summer recess followed by a snap election.  Could be but he'd be risking the secure majority term he has remaining to push through Northern Gateway.  If he wound up with a minority, that pipeline could be in real jeopardy.

My guess is that Steve is going to play this one by ear.  He'll shut down Parliament as soon as the auditors' reports are made public and then figure out how to keep from becoming personally implicated in the Duffy/Wright scandal while taming his unruly senate caucus.  It's hard to see how he'll come back after Labour Day with the same, cohesive happy warriors who brought him his majority government.  And no one knows better than Steve the difference between calculated risk and reckless gamble.

Harper is vulnerable and he knows it.   He's not in control of the narrative this time and, for him, control is everything.

If you want more, read the transcript of the CBC's interview with retired  House of Commons law clerk Rob Walsh.   Here's how the Parliamentary veteran summed it up:

In my years on the Hill, there have been a number of huge controversies over the years, as you know. No two of them seem alike. This, to me, is unbelievable, frankly. It just simply is unbelievable.

Stephen Harper must feel isolated.   He's shed senators like a mangy dog loses fur.   And now his chief of staff, Nigel Wright, has packed it in, leaving the PMO under a very large, black cloud.

The Organization of American States has issued a report on global drugs policy that, some believe, could lead to the end of blanket prohibition.

Publication of the Organisation of American States (OAS) review, commissioned at last year's Cartagena Summit of the Americas attended by Barack Obama, reflects growing dissatisfaction among Latin American countries with the current global policy on illicit drugs. It spells out the effects of the policy on many countries and examines what the global drugs trade will look like if the status quo continues. It notes how rapidly countries' unilateral drugs policies are evolving, while at the same time there is a growing consensus over the human costs of the trade. "Growing media attention regarding this phenomenon in many countries, including on social media, reflects a world in which there is far greater awareness of the violence and suffering associated with the drug problem," José Miguel Insulza, the secretary general of the OAS, says in a foreword to the review. "We also enjoy a much better grasp of the human and social costs not only of drug use but also of the production and transit of controlled substances."

Experts described the publication of the review as a historic moment. "This report represents the most high-level discussion about drug policy reform ever undertaken, and shows tremendous leadership from Latin America on the global debate," said Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, director of the Open Society Foundation's Global Drug Policy Program, which has described its publication as a "game-changer".

"While leaders have talked about moving from criminalisation to public health in drug policy, punitive, abstinence-only approaches have still predominated, even in the health sphere," said Daniel Wolfe, director of the Open Society Foundation's International Harm Reduction Program. "These scenarios offer a chance for leaders to replace indiscriminate detention and rights' abuses with approaches that distinguish between users and traffickers, and offer the community-based health services that work best for those in need."

■ The open letter from the Global Commission on Drug Policy is signed by George P Shultz, the former US secretary of state; Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the US federal reserve, and the former presidents of Mexico, Chile and Colombia

This might be why Alberta isn't too crazy about refining Athabasca bitumen on site and why British Columbia should reject the proposal to refine it in Kitimat.


"This" is a 3-storey high, city block sized pile of bitumen coke steadily growing ever larger across the Detroit River from Windsor's waterfront Assumption Park.   The stuff belongs to Koch Carbon, one of David and Charlie's operations of course.  In terms of emissions, even Alberta won't touch it.   That's why Koch Carbon looks to peddle the stuff overseas.

How does all this garbage get from Athabasca to Detroit?  You guessed it, via a pipeline that delivers 28,000 barrels a day of diluted bitumen, or dilbit, to Marathon Petroleum's refinery in the Motor City.

That's the contaminated petroleum coke residue from 28,000 barrels a day of Athabasca bitumen.   Enbridge is looking to move 800,000 barrels a day to Kitimat.   Imagine the mountains of petroleum coke that would scar the coast if that garbage was to be refined in Kitimat.

Fom The New York Times:

An initial refining process known as coking, which releases the oil from the tarlike bitumen in the oil sands, also leaves the petroleum coke, of which Canada has 79.8 million tons stockpiled. Some is dumped in open-pit oil sands mines and tailing ponds in Alberta. Much is just piled up there.
Detroit’s pile will not be the only one. Canada’s efforts to sell more products derived from oil sands to the United States, which include transporting it through the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, have pulled more coking south to American refineries, creating more waste product here.
“Here’s a little bit of Alberta,” said Brian Masse, one of Windsor’s Parliament members. “For those that thought they were immune from the oil sands and the consequences of them, we’re now seeing up front and center that we’re not.”
Coke, which is mainly carbon, is an essential ingredient in steelmaking as well as producing the electrical anodes used to make aluminum.
While there is high demand from both those industries, the small grains and high sulfur content of this petroleum coke make it largely unusable for those purposes, said Kerry Satterthwaite, a petroleum coke analyst at Roskill Information Services, a commodities analysis company based in London.
“It is worse than a byproduct,” Ms. Satterthwaite said.“It’s a waste byproduct that is costly and inconvenient to store, but effectively costs nothing to produce.”
Murray Gray, the scientific director for the Center for Oil Sands Innovation at the University of Alberta, said that about two years ago, Alberta backed away from plans to use the petroleum coke as a fuel source, partly over concerns about greenhouse-gas emissions. Some of it is burned there, however, to power coking plants.  
In a nutshell, when we export Athabasca bitumen part of the package includes super cheap and super dirty petroleum coke that can only be flogged to the sort of overseas buyers who don't have qualms about burning it.  And, naturally, it's got big appeal to Charlie and David Coke er, Koch. 

 And what about the leftover coke? The Environmental Protection Agency will no longer allow any new licenses permitting the burning of petroleum coke in the United States. But D. Mark Routt, a staff energy consultant at KBC Advanced Technologies in Houston, said that overseas companies saw it as a cheap alternative to low-grade coal. In China, it is used to generate electricity, adding to that country’s air-quality problems. There is also strong demand from India and Latin America for American petroleum coke, where it mainly fuels cement-making kilns.
“I’m not making a value statement, but it comes down to emission controls,” Mr. Routt said. “Other people don’t seem to have a problem, which is why it is going to Mexico, which is why it is going to China.”
Oh, Mr. Routt, you're making a statement all right, a clear statement about the people who are trafficking in petroleum coke and the petro-pols who would rather this little problem not be raised. 

The giant accounting firm, Deloitte, was retained to conduct a forensic audit of the expenses claimed by specific senators.   In three cases there were questions of whether the individuals were in fact entitled to the extra housing allowance the senate provides to members not from Ottawa and environs.

And then, because her travel expenses seemed out of line, they also looked into the spending/reiumbursement of senator Pam Wallin of Wadena, Saskatchewan.

Something happened yesterday that raises new questions - this time concerning the auditor, Deloitte, in its audit of Pam Wallin.

It began when Pam Wallin announced she was temporarily "recusing" herself from the Conservative caucus.  That fell apart when CTV reported that she didn't jump, she was pushed, by the Prime Minister's Office after Harper officials had reviewed the preliminary audit into Wallin's expenses.

That one little detail speaks volumes.  Just what was Deloitte doing feeding preliminary audit results directly to Information Control Central, the PMO, if, as the CTV report suggests, that's what actually happened?

This certainly raises the appearance that the audit process is being manipulated for spin control purposes - the prime minister gets to see the results and cull the herd long  before the public or the opposition gets a whiff of what's coming.   And if that is in fact what's going on, surely Deloitte has become co-opted into the partisan political process of the PMO which raises questions about the integrity of the audit itself and what else Deloitte has been up to in the course of its investigations.

Stephen Harper is renowned as a control freak and he's shown that he's obsessed with maintaining an iron grip on information in all aspects.

The public needs to know if Deloitte was independent of the government in these audits as claimed.

So many questions.  Did the independent auditor give the PMO a sneak preview of Mike Duffy's political urine test results too?  Did the auditor, deliberately or inadvertently, help the prime minister and his staff shape their now failed plans to simply slip Duffy a cheque to make this all go away?  Has Deloitte been an insider all along?

Earlier today, Harper-appointed senator Pam Wallin purported to "recuse" herself from the Conservative caucus pending the outcome of a forensic audit into her expenses.

Nice try, Pam.  According to CTV, Pam actually did the "PMO Perp Walk."   She didn't so much leave as she was shown the door after Harper's big guns got a gander at the preliminary audit report.

Nice of the "independent" auditors to give Harper the heads up, no?

"...a source told CTV’s Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife that the audit has already raised serious questions about Wallin’s spending, which involves hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Insiders told Fife that Wallin repaid $25,000 before the forensic audit began. She has since returned about $15,000 more to taxpayers, but sources say she will likely have to give more money back.
As the controversy over senate expenses grows, Fife reported there’s word Prime Minister Stephen Harper may prorogue Parliament in early June.

Yes, of course, Steve.   When the going gets ugly shut down Parliament and lay low until the heat dies.

Wallin, the darling of her hometown of Wadena, Saskatchewan, gave yoeman service to Harper for a good while before she earned her berth in the upper bunk.   She seemed to get a taste for the high life when Jean Chretien had her appointed Canada's consul-general in the Big Apple.  It has been reported she maintains residences in Ottawa, New York, Toronto and, of course, Wasilla, er Wadena.

By the way, if you're cruising through Wadena, be sure to have your picture taken at the Pam Wallin Drive street sign.   You'll have no problem finding it.  Just look for the town stop sign.  You can't miss it.


And if you simply cannot get enough of the Senate Mardi Gras fete, Coyne has a dandy wrap up today.

If you've spent any time in grizzly territory, chances are you have wondered at some point what it might be like if you found yourself face to face with the big brown bear.  Wonder no more.

Crews filming The Great Bear StakeOut had a Go-Pro camera attached to a rock, hoping to catch some grizzly video.   The bear, and her cub, thought it looked tasty.   So here, for your weekend amusement, is what you never, ever want to see in person.



Now it's been a real bitch of a week and so I think I'll take my leave.  Have a great holiday weekend everyone.  Next week is bound to be better.