Canadian Corruption Scandal

[Tikker]

You mean a seperation of powers between the judiciary, the executive and the legislature?

I'm not sure that I'd really even compare that. the countries are run VERY differently, and your model for government doesn't really apply to ours

[Rust]

You mean a seperation of powers between the judiciary, the executive and the legislature?

I'm not sure that I'd really even compare that. the countries are run VERY differently, and your model for government doesn't really apply to ours

Canada is a parliamentary democracy - the legislature is the executive. The Prime Minister sits in Parliament as a Member and as head of Government. The Head of State is the Queen, but that role is 99% ceremonial.

The judiciary is vastly more independant of politics in Canada. We don't elect judges, they're appointed, but the appointments process has very little, if any, partisanship. For example, judges on the Supreme Court are appointed by the Prime Minister, but I'd have to say that apart from picking Judges from across the various regions of Canada, we've seen PM's pick from 2 or 3 of the 'best' judges by general legal opinion (Canadian Bar Association, etc). The process could easily become as corrupt and partisan as the US one, but there's a lot of tradition against it, and appointing openly hack judges (like Clarence Thomas) would hurt the government at the polls.

--R.

[Lyion]

Hmm, some would disagree. It seems unlike the US, your leaders are FREE TO implement piss poor biased hacks without any parliamentary procedure.

http://www.bcrevolution.ca/gov_stacking_court.htm

Also, your countries lack of true separation of powers makes it ripe for a lot more corruption than just 'special interests', as is being seen.

But Conservative MPs Vic Toews and Peter MacKay say it's a flawed process. They've long been in favour of parliamentary hearings similar to those held in the United States.

In the U.S., prospective Supreme Court judges are grilled by a congressional committee.

"We feel it falls far short of having a meaningful consultation with parliamentarians," MacKay said.

Prime Minister Paul Martin has promised to make the appointment process more open. MacKay and Toews said it's another example of Martin breaking his promises.

But Martin has said the process would be revised after the current nominations. The government claims it was caught off guard by its two vacancies in the Supreme Court.

[Ciladan]

On a quick side note about vulnerabilities in our government:

From my understanding, if a bill is defeated in the house of commons, the Prime Minister is traditionally supposed to take it as a vote of non-confidence and call an election. However, as far as I can tell, (and correct me if I'm wrong), he does not HAVE to call an election if he doesn't want to. As in, there is nothing in writing stating that the PM MUST step down after a bill defeat.

This has never happened and the tradition has been respected but it makes me nervous thinking about how a party could never be removed from power if they didn't want to.

[Rust]

Hmm, some would disagree. It seems unlike the US, your leaders are FREE TO implement piss poor biased hacks without any parliamentary procedure.

http://www.bcrevolution.ca/gov_stacking_court.htm

Your site isn't saying we have bad judges, just that they don't like the way they're selected. I agree that the PM has the right to put anyone he wants on the Court. It's just that that sort of thing doesn't happen.

I'd ask for people to point out which hacks have actually been appointed then that would compare to Clarence Thomas.

The process may not be perfect, but I'd suggest looking at the people selected by it as a real metric. And on that score we do fine. The Reform party are just playing the populism card again, that's all.

I don't defend the process; I defend the result.

--R.

[Narrock]

Hmm, some would disagree. It seems unlike the US, your leaders are FREE TO implement piss poor biased hacks without any parliamentary procedure.

http://www.bcrevolution.ca/gov_stacking_court.htm

Your site isn't saying we have bad judges, just that they don't like the way they're selected. I agree that the PM has the right to put anyone he wants on the Court. It's just that that sort of thing doesn't happen.

I'd ask for people to point out which hacks have actually been appointed then that would compare to Clarence Thomas.

The process may not be perfect, but I'd suggest looking at the people selected by it as a real metric. And on that score we do fine. The Reform party are just playing the populism card again, that's all.

I don't defend the process; I defend the result.

--R.

Clarence Thomas is the best U.S. Supreme Court Justice that has ever served. I couldn't tell by your remark if you also acknowledge that, or if you were being sarcastic.

[Rust]

Clarence Thomas is the best U.S. Supreme Court Justice that has ever served. I couldn't tell by your remark if you also acknowledge that, or if you were being sarcastic.

I'll assume you're simply trolling here as nobody in their right mind could actually believe that and still be able to use a computer.

--R. 'walk on past, nothign to see here, keep moving along folks'

[Narrock]

Clarence Thomas is the best U.S. Supreme Court Justice that has ever served. I couldn't tell by your remark if you also acknowledge that, or if you were being sarcastic.

I'll assume you're simply trolling here as nobody in their right mind could actually believe that and still be smart able to use a computer.

--R. 'walk on past, nothign to see here, keep moving along folks'

Well, that answers my question...

I actually figured I would get a response like that out of a liberal like you.

And I'm not trolling. I love Canada, just not her politics.

[Rust]

Clarence Thomas is the best U.S. Supreme Court Justice that has ever served. I couldn't tell by your remark if you also acknowledge that, or if you were being sarcastic.

I'll assume you're simply trolling here as nobody in their right mind could actually believe that and still be smart able to use a computer.

--R. 'walk on past, nothign to see here, keep moving along folks'

Well, that answers my question...

I actually figured I would get a response like that out of a liberal like you.

And I'm not trolling. I love Canada, just not her politics.

Hellfire, Thomas isn't fit to be on the same court as Scalia or Rehnquist alone. Then we could mention John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Joseph Story, or Louis Brandeis off the top of my head.

Mind you I can see the attraction - Thomas is to the USSC as the SDA Church is to Christianity - a wierd outlier.

--R.

[labbats]

Canadian Government 101

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
King Arthur: Old woman.
Dennis: Man.
King Arthur: Man, sorry. What knight lives in that castle over there?
Dennis: I'm 37.
King Arthur: What?
Dennis: I'm 37. I'm not old.
King Arthur: Well I can't just call you "man".
Dennis: Well you could say "Dennis".
King Arthur: I didn't know you were called Dennis.
Dennis: Well you didn't bother to find out did you?
King Arthur: I did say sorry about the "old woman", but from behind you looked...
Dennis: What I object to is you automatically treat me like an inferior.
King Arthur: Well I am king.
Dennis: Oh, king eh? Very nice. And how'd you get that, eh? By exploiting the workers. By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
King Arthur: I am your king.
Woman: Well I didn't vote for you.
King Arthur: You don't vote for kings.
Woman: Well how'd you become king then?
[Angelic music plays... ]
King Arthur: The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence that I, Arthur, was to carry Excalibur. THAT is why I am your king.
Dennis: [interrupting] Listen, strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dennis: Oh, but you can't expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dennis: Oh but if I went 'round sayin' I was Emperor, just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dennis: Come see the violence inherent in the system. Help, help, I'm being repressed.

[Trielelvan]

[Rust]

c.f. "Shawinigan Handshake"

--R.

[Tikker]

Clarence Thomas is the best U.S. Supreme Court Justice that has ever served. I couldn't tell by your remark if you also acknowledge that, or if you were being sarcastic.

I'll assume you're simply trolling here as nobody in their right mind could actually believe that and still be smart able to use a computer.

--R. 'walk on past, nothign to see here, keep moving along folks'

Well, that answers my question...

I actually figured I would get a response like that out of a liberal like you.

And I'm not trolling. I love Canada, just not her politics.

Just to quibble a completely irrelevant, and mostly unneccesary bit of truth, Canada is one of the few masculine names (when referring to countries)!

[Ciladan]

I can't wait until I travel europe in a few years. I hear Canadians are practically treated like royalty there :D

[brinstar]

ciladan if you came to america i would treat you like royalty if you know what i mean

[Ciladan]

Hehe my friends want to visit the US soon too, if we're ever near Nebraska we're stopping in ^_^

oh and txt msg me your phone # again. It looks like I lost it :S

[labbats]

I hear Nebraska is a hot new destination for Canadian types.

*tumbleweed*

[Zanchief]

Most printed news outlets in Canada are actually very conservative bias, Lyion.

And as for the consensus of Canadian political ideology from the dozen friends you know, would it surprise you that every American I have ever met in person thought that Bush was a complete moron? I, of course, never assumed this was a proper barometer of American opinion.

If you want to truly know the political break down in Canada, just look at the results of the last election. Liberals won, not that I was too happy about it, but at least it wasn't the conservatives.

[Ciladan]

Klein sunk the conservative's campaign with his privatization comments

[Narrock]

Victoria, B.C. is beautiful.

[Lyion]

Hmm, interesting review

http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/Columnist ... 89946.html

By GREG WESTON -- Sun Ottawa Bureau

If Adscam was the only problem Paul Martin faced, notes Greg Weston, he'd be in trouble. But things may be far, far worse than that ...

It is an understatement to say this week's shocking Adscam testimony from Montreal advertising executive Jean Brault was every taxpayer's horror, the sponsorship program suddenly exposed as a reeking swamp of fraud, kickbacks and money laundering, all in the name of the federal Liberal Party in Quebec.

Now for the bad news: Adscam is likely just a puddle in a far wider, deeper and dirtier cesspool of corruption involving potentially billions of dollars in government programs unrelated to the sponsorship fiasco.

***

For years, lucrative government ad contracts have been treated like so much political pork by the party in power, dispensed to loyal firms as a reward for providing "free" ad services during elections.

Systematically fleeced

Piece it all together, and taxpayers have been systematically fleeced for millions of dollars of Liberal Party election advertising.

But the ad scams don't end on election day. Investigations by the auditor general and now the Gomery inquiry point to potentially widespread bid-rigging.

It is a huge amount of money. In the same time the Liberal government squandered $250 million on the sponsorship program, over $800 million was spent on federal ad programs.

As it happened, a pile of that cash went directly into the coffers of the same Quebec ad firms involved in Adscam.

Were palms greased and favours granted? Hmmm.

The government also hands out billions of dollars a month in contracts for everything from military tanks to pencils.

While the auditor general found bureaucrats broke "every rule in the book" in the sponsorship scandal, evidence is emerging at the Gomery inquiry that Adscam may be only the tip of corruption in government contracting.

In one case that emerged at Gomery this week, Groupaction president Brault described how a $100,000 bribe got the firm over $5 million in contracts with the federal Justice Department.

According to the AG, in 1998, Justice officials were not happy with work being done by Groupaction and wanted to re-tender the contract. The retendering process began, but suddenly "was halted without explanation, and Groupaction was retained until mid-2002" after getting another $5.4 million in contracts.

What really happened, according to Brault, was he had asked Liberal Party bagman Joe Morselli to see if anything could be done to help Groupaction keep the contract in 1999. The two men met one day in Montreal, Brault testified, and Morselli told him: "$100,000 and your problem is solved."

Brault said he slipped the first $50,000 to Morselli at a spaghetti dinner, and never got around to paying the second instalment before the sponsorship scandal erupted in 2002.

***

Over $1 billion has been thrown at the largely useless registry, four times the total amount wasted on the entire sponsorship program. To date, no one knows how much of that money was pilfered, laundered, or otherwise made to vanish in shady deals.

In one case, a Sun investigation almost two years ago revealed Groupaction billed the feds hundreds of thousands of dollars for gun registry work that no one seems to remember being done. The firm is now facing criminal charges related to those contracts.

The government hires thousands of private contractors for a vast array of services, at a cost of billions of dollars a year. There is now evidence some of them may have been victims of a systematic shakedown by Liberal operatives.

A year ago, we reported a case of one public relations executive caught in a shakedown by one of the Liberal ad firms now implicated in the sponsorship scandal. On Friday, the case became part of the Gomery inquiry.

Ad exec Jean Lambert testified that his spouse, Sylvie Cloutier, had won a competitive bid for a $200,000 Health Canada contract in 1994. Instead, she was forced to run the work through Lafleur Communications, a firm now at the centre of Adscam.

The Gomery commission was told Cloutier was forced to pay Lafleur $50,000 to do nothing but pass along her invoices to the government.

None of these potential scum ponds of corruption -- advertising, contracting, the gun registry, shakedowns -- had anything to do with the sponsorship program.

Worse, they were business as usual in the Chretien government -- a government in which Paul Martin was finance minister for eight years.

Martin can now try to run from the Adscam mess, but he cannot hide from the rest of the government he helped to run.

[Zanchief]

Funny you didn't link the picture of the half naked "Sun Girl" in the centerfold of every Ottawa Sun newspaper.

Maybe you can link an article from Hustler next, Lyion.

[Ciladan]

Funny you didn't link the picture of the half naked "Sun Girl" in the centerfold of every Ottawa Sun newspaper.

Maybe you can link an article from Hustler next, Lyion.

<a href="http://www.canoe.ca/TorontoSunshine/ssg_sun.html">Oh I found her</a>

Calgary Sun has one too

[Lyion]

Regardless of the 'entertainment' versus journalism factor of the paper, there seemed to be some valid points raised.

I'm curious how deep the corruption runs there.

[Rust]

Klein sunk the conservative's campaign with his privatization comments

I think that had to be deliberate to nail Harper, on Klein's part.

--R.