Category: Canada

In an unusual plea for assistance from a group known for its fear of outsiders, Canadian Muslims reached out to mainstream Canada to help manage an impulse among younger Muslims towards fundamentalism and radical Islam, the Toronto Star reported last night. Part blameshift and part honest introspection, the request for a conference on better integration at least acknowledges that the problem exists:

Muslim leaders pleaded for help Thursday in their struggle against extremists in their midst, saying they can’t fight a small minority of radicals alone.
“We’re not here to say we don’t have an issue,” said social worker Shahina Siddiqui, president of the Islamic Social Services Association.
“Of course we have an issue,” she told a news conference on Parliament Hill. “But we can’t deal with it ourselves. We’re part of the Canadian society and so we demand that the Canadian society come forward, help us root out this.”
Her group joined the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Canadian Muslim Civil Liberties Association and several other agencies pushing for a related summit by the end of June.
They hope the meeting would bring together Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, Toronto Mayor David Miller and a host of community and youth groups.
The Ontario government and Miller’s office were quick to say they would take part. There was no immediate response from Harper’s office, but Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day has asked the Muslim groups for more details.

The blameshifting tradition for Muslims associated with these groups did not disappear. Siddiqui blames public scrutiny of Muslims after years of Islamist terror attacks around the world for radicalizing Western Muslims. Naturally, that extends to Western media, which she accuses of possessing an anti-Islam tilt. The pressure causes resentment, and Siddiqui says that Muslims lack venues for venting their frustration, leading to radicalization.
That seems a rather convenient excuse, of course. It falls into the same category of the childish “you made me be bad” excuse that most people realize is a rationalization by the time they’re in their teens. Siddiqui’s associate at Canada CAIR continues along this same line, demanding better public education on Islam so that Canadians will not be so judgmental of Muslims. The lesson that Karl Nickner advocates — “Terrorism, as you know, is antithetical to Muslim belief and is a perversion of its teachings” — has been beaten into almost every media story on Muslims since 9/11 and almost every pronouncement on radical Islam by the US government. He also wants sensitivity training for Canada’s CSIS and law enforcement agencies, although they appear to have done rather well lately in their real job of providing security for Canada, rather than Nickner’s priority of building self-esteem for Muslims.
We’re tired of the years that we have heard this rhetoric. We’d like to start seeing some proof of this, perhaps by mosques expelling radical members and imams demanding that their congregations cooperate with law enforcement to identify and isolate the radical elements that plague them as well as us.
Siddiqui comes much closer to the mark when she talks about possible methods of correcting the descent of their youth into radicalism. She wants to publish a handbook for Muslim parents exhorting them to carefully watch with whom their children associate at the mosques and in the streets. That sounds like something Muslims could do without holding a summit. It’s never a bad idea to meet with people who want positive solutions to real problems, but perhaps it might be more valuable for Siddiqui to ask her own community to take responsibility for their children first before shifting blame for them onto all other Canadians. When they start there, summits and conferences have a much better chance for success.

Chuck Guité, one of the handful of people who faced criminal prosecution for his part in the Adscam corruption case that brought down the Liberal government, got convicted of five counts related to the fraud. The presiding judge gleefully revoked Guité’s bail, which means he will start serving time while the judge ponders his sentence:

Chuck Guité, the operational mastermind at the centre of the federal sponsorship boondoggle, was sent straight to jail Tuesday for steering money-for-nothing contracts to a friendly ad firm.
Guité, 62, clasped his hands as the jury foreman, a scrapyard manager, read the guilty verdict on five counts of fraud.
Justice Fraser Martin immediately told Guité he would go to prison for his crime — defrauding the federal government of about $1.5 million.
“I have no hesitation cancelling your bail conditions,” the judge said, surprising even the Crown prosecutor with the swift incarceration.
Martin said Guité, 62, will certainly receive jail time after sentencing arguments Friday but it “remains to be seen how long it will be.”

Judge Martin appears to have learned a little from the fallout of an earlier Adscam sentencing. When Paul Coffin’s sentence for his part in the fraud amounted to probation and community service, Canadians were outraged. In fact, his fine didn’t even approach the amount the trial proved he received from his fraud, and the only tough part of the sentence was a requirement to speak out against corruption at colleges and universities. Coffin later got resentenced to 18 months in prison when the Crown appealed Judge Boilard’s highly lenient sentence. Jean Breault pled guilty to the same five counts as Guité and got a year more than Coffin for his trouble.
Guité deserves at least as much time. He stole more than Coffin, at least as far as prosecutors could determine for both men, and he also went back and worked at the firm he used to launder the money to remain close to the action. He has shown no real remorse for his crimes, and his position as a public servant is one aggravating factor that didn’t apply to Brault. As the last of the three men charged with any crimes in connection with Adscam, Judge Martin may want to send a strong message about corruption and government officials as well.
Guité will have plenty of time to reflect on all of these possibilities, as he gets his head start on the sentence. He may well wonder, as many Canadians already do, why he is the last man to get charged with a crime that saw $350 million disappear through so many hands. (via Newsbeat1

Several Canadian CQ readers have sent this update on Joe Volpe, candidate for the Liberal leadership post, who ran into some embarrassment when two of his major contributors turned out to be 11-year-old twins of a drug company executive. Volpe raised $54,000 from two families that had everyone contribute the maximum $5400, including underage children in apparent violation of Canada’s campaign finance laws. The Liberal Party insists that the contribution came from the children and not from their parents, which would violate the strawman ban on using other people to launder contributions.
The Liberals just can’t seem to shake their reputation for financing shenanigans, and now it looks like they’ve decided to enhance it by attempting to silence Volpe’s critics. A satirical website, youthforvolpe.ca, attempted to poke fun at Volpe’s predicament by posing as a contribution website for civic-minded Canadian youngsters. Not seeing the humor, Volpe reacted by having the website shut down:

It was all the buzz in official Ottawa yesterday — a hilarious political whodunit in this age of websites, platforms and templates.
Overnight, someone built a website spoofing Liberal leadership candidate Joe Volpe and his acceptance of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from children, including the 11-year-old twins of a former vice-president of a generic drug company.
By early yesterday afternoon, the Volpe team had the website pulled down. …
Mr. Volpe’s campaign had the site shut down without knowing, it seems, who put it up: “Hi Everyone,” wrote Brenden Johnstone, who is with the Volpe campaign, in an e-mail to other leadership campaigns. “There has been concern about how the issue of the Volpe donations was reflecting on the leadership race.
“My Office has had the website suspended through CIRA [Canadian Internet Registration Authority] and CDNS [Canadian Domain Name Services] and it will be down as soon as 6 p.m. I think the issue with the website has been dealt with. . . .”

If Volpe’s office thinks that pressuring the hosting service to silence his critics will “deal with” the problem, I suspect they have some naivete on the Internet. More than just showing a thin skin, Volpe and his office will likely provoke a torrent of criticism that will dwarf any consideration of questionable contributions. Does the Liberal Party really stand for government officials bullying hosting services into gagging their critics?
Stephen Taylor, Canada’s (future!) blogging Parliamentarian, has a few words to say about this:

This is absurd, censorship and an abuse of power. As a citizen, regardless of your political affiliation, and as a Internet consumer, this should outrage you. The Internet is for free speech, and this fundamental freedom is really only labeled as such because it is one of those elements of our liberty that had to be protected from tyrants with power. If one cannot lampoon a political candidate (the archetype of free speech in a free society) then we aren’t truly free. What is perhaps most chilling is that this censorship has come from a candidate for the Prime Ministership.
If you believe in freedom of speech online and abhor the strongarmed actions of Mr. Volpe against Canadians and the Internet citizenry, please trackback this post and pass this on to all of those who might share this concern.
and then… why not send him an email to voice your concerns: Volpe.J@parl.gc.ca

In an update, Taylor confirms that the provider, CADNS.ca, shut down the website due to their fears of exposure to litigation from Volpe and his campaign. That transpired after Volpe’s office contacted the registrar and informed them of that possibility. The man who aspires to the Prime Minister’s office not only cannot handle criticism, but also has no trouble throwing his weight around to silence it.
After Adscam, is this the kind of public relations the Grits need?
UPDATE: Stephen Taylor has not quite made it to Parliament yet, but we’re hopeful. And CQ reader Mr, Michael (one of the readers who tipped me) shows us where we can see the site in PDF format.

Stephen Harper has led perhaps the quietest revolution in Anglosphere poliitics. In just four short months, he has vaulted the Conservative Party — only a couple of years past a difficult merger with Reform — into a movement that now threatens to swamp even the Bloc Quebecois in the fractious province of Quebec. A new Ipsos poll shows that the Tories now have enough voters to get a majority in Parliament if elections were held today:

According to a new Ipsos Reid survey conducted on behalf of CanWest/Global, the current Conservative Party government is enjoying their highest levels of federal vote support in nearly 20 years, since Brian Mulroney’s majority in November of 1988.
Currently, 43% of federal voters support the Conservative Party (+5 points since a mid-March Ipsos Reid poll), giving them an impressive 18-point lead over their chief federal rival, the Liberal Party (25%, -3 points). The NDP (15%, -4 points) trail the Liberals, while the Green Party (5%, unchanged) remains much further back.

The poll holds bad news for all of the Conservative rivals. Liberals, who held power for the past thirteen years, now trail the Tories by almost twenty points nationally. Part of this may be the extended transition of Liberal leadership, but undoubtedly it has something to do with the exposure of their previous smear jobs on Harper as falsehoods. The Grits under Paul Martin continually painted Harper as an extremist with a “hidden agenda”, but Harper has proven them liars with his straightforward, center-right governance.
Nowhere has this phenomenon shone through better than Ontario. The seat of power and a longtime Liberal stronghold, the Tories now lead by four points, just within the margin of error. The gain comes from the Liberals but more from Harper’s parliamentary partner, the NDP, which has seen its support halved, losing eleven points to fall to 11%. Considering the usually leftward bent of the government bureaucracy in Ontario, this result should stun politicians in the province.
The Conservatives now lead in every demographic category, including young voters, as well as in every province but Quebec. However, even here the Tories show their strength. BQ had long enjoyed majority support within its home province, which caused worry about separatist intent. Now BQ only leads the Tories 38-33, demonstrating not just Tory momentum but a significant shift in support for the Canadian Union. Liberals, who usually picked up the few remaining non-BQ seats in the province, now have fallen behind the struggling NDP in fourth place.
Harper appears to be uniting Canada behind the Tories and setting a course for long-term center-right rule. The Liberals have only been saved so far by a lack of choices for the thinning ranks of Tory opponents in Canada. If these numbers continue to show this kind of strength, the Tories may want to hold elections soon to get a majority government in Parliament.

A new poll by Ipsos-Reid delivers more bad news to the Liberals in Canada. One of their pet projects, the national gun registry, now has a clear majority across the nation declaring that the program doesn’t work, is badly organized, and should be eliminated — and they blame the Liberals for the mess:

A new Ipsos Reid survey for CanWest/Global News reports that most Canadians (54%) feel the “gun registry is badly organized, isn’t working properly, and should be scrapped” – a level of opinion essentially unchanged from what was recorded nearly four years, and two Prime Ministers ago (53% expressed this opinion in a December 2002 Ipsos Reid survey).
And, if the Auditor General of Canada produced a report that indicated that there had been widespread mismanagement and waste within the gun registry itself:
* 56% say they would most blame “the former Liberal Government and elected politicians who built the gun registry and oversaw it”, while
* 37% say they would most blame “the government workers who were put in charge of administering the gun registry on a day-to-day basis”.

A majority of Canadians still believe in a gun registry of some kind, and that support is strongest in predictable provinces: Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada. Alberta, Sasketchewan, and Manitoba have the most opposition to such a program, again hardly a surprise. Other internals of this poll are less predictable. Elimination of the program gets majority support in almost all provinces except Quebec and Atlantic Canada, the latter of which still rejects the current gun registry by a plurality (49%). Liberal blame gets majority support in all provinces, with only Quebec seeing employee incompetence rise over 40% support for the reason the registry has failed.
This news cannot provide much hope for the Liberals in their effort to quickly turn their fortunes around. They took a program that enjoys fair to good support throughout most of the nation and fumbled it so badly that a majority want it dumped. It demonstrates a lack of trust in Liberal competency that gives voter dissatisfaction a new dimension apart from the ethical debacle of Adscam. It suggests that getting rid of the crooks may not be enough, but that the Liberals have to show that new leadership must have a track record of success in policy implementation.
Right now, Harper and the Tories have begun to build that reputation after years of getting smeared by Liberals as radicals with hidden agendas. The new and professional government of Stephen Harper, with its modest demeanor and ambitious policy, provides a stark contrast thus far to the incompetency of the Gun Registry and the party that created it.

In a rather stunning political development, the Conservative Party has pulled ahead of Bloc Quebecois, according to a poll taken by La Presse. The reversal of years of decline in Tory fortunes comes as a shock to the separatists, who had almost reached majority support just a few months ago (via Newsbeat1):

The Conservatives are rapidly gaining support in Quebec and are now more popular than the province’s separatist party, according to a new poll published on Tuesday.
The CROP poll for La Presse put the Conservatives at 34 percent in Quebec, up from the 25 percent the party won during the January 23 election. The separatist Bloc Quebecois, which a few months ago was flirting with 50 percent backing, dropped to 31 percent from 42 percent on January 23.
The Conservatives, led by Stephen Harper, unexpectedly took 10 of Quebec’s 75 seats in the election, helping them win a fragile minority federal government and thereby ending 12 years of Liberal rule.

Four months ago, the Tories won a narrower mandate than initially predicted, and some analysts thought that Stephen Harper had taken the Conservatives to the limit of its support. The Liberals beat predictions of a meltdown in January and thought that a leadership change would invigorate the disgraced party and put a quick end to the Tory test drive.
Instead, Harper has surprised even his own supporters by building broad-based support for the Conservatives. He has expanded the party’s reach into the urban power base of the Grits, making inroads with younger voters and minorities with his moderate approach to governing. Now in Quebec, Harper may have achieved his greatest achievement yet, displacing both BQ and the Liberals, roaring from a distant third in the restive province a year ago to the top of the polls. Once the dominant party in Quebec, the Liberals only poll a paltry 15%, less than half of the Tories or BQ.
These results almost guarantee a quick election in the near future. Canadians have discovered that the Liberal line on Harper and his supposedly “secret agenda” turned out to be nothing but an empty scare tactic by Paul Martin and others trying desperately to cling to power. They now reap the harvest of their dishonesty in this and many other issues, and if Harper gets his election, the Canadians may well turn their Tory test drive into a majority Conservative government.

After winning their last national election more narrowly than predicted, the Conservatives came into government with a restricted mandate and a short leash. Now, however, they have inspired confidence in their no-nonsense, professional manner and the Canadian electorate has responded accordingly:

The Conservatives have seized a commanding lead in popularity over the Liberals and inched into majority-government territory, says a new survey released Wednesday.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Tories held a 15-point advantage over the Liberals and broke past what is considered the benchmark for winning a majority government, says the Decima poll. …
The Conservatives stood at 41 per cent — one point above the mark that is traditionally considered the dividing line that separates majorities from minorities.
The Liberals held 26 per cent and the NDP, despite its continued efforts to chip away at Liberal support, remained a distant third at 19 per cent.
Decima’s chief pollster says the Conservatives have been steadily gaining ground since the election. They won a minority government with 36 per cent of the popular vote on Jan. 23.

The Liberals set themselves up for failure and now reap their harvest. They painted the Conservatives as radical and PM Stephen Harper as a bogeyman with dark “hidden agendas” that would destroy the Canadian Union. Instead, Canadians see a competent and uncontroversial government proceeding professionally with the nation’s business, pursuing moderate goals moderately. The Liberals will have to spend their time wiping the egg off of their faces, and so will the NDP that conspired with them to keep the Tories from rising to power for several months.
The new strength for the Tories comes in traditional Liberal stomping grounds — urban areas, young voters, and women. They have even opened up a wide margin on the Grits in Ontario, the Liberal power base, with 40% of voters supporting Stephen Harper and his party. The Tories lead the Grits in every area of Canada except the Atlantic provinces, although they trail Bloc Quebecois in Quebec, of course. If Harper can nail down the softwood compromise with Washington, that will push Conservative numbers even higher.
With the Conservatives proving themselves as adept centrists, the Canadian electorate will be forced to re-evaluate the Liberals and their scare tactics. In fact, that re-evaluation appears to have already begun, and the rudderless Grits have already begun paying the price.

The largest issue in US-Canadian relations may move to a resolution within the next few days, according to the Globe & Mail. The free-trade dispute over softwood subsidies has complicated relations between Washington and Ottawa since the NAFTA accord, but the new Tory government may have found the key to bringing the issue to a close:

Canada and the United States appear very close to a historic breakthrough in the enduring softwood lumber dispute.
Industry sources who have been briefed on the discussions told The Globe and Mail that U.S. President George W. Bush called Stephen Harper on the weekend to outline an offer. In it the United States would lift duties on Canadian lumber and return most of the $5-billion it has collected from Canadian lumber companies.
In a complex arrangement that would include both a quota and an export tax, Canada would agree to cap its share of the U.S. lumber market at one third, which is roughly the current level.

PM Stephen Harper wanted to resolve the dispute before making a visit to DC, and the deal looks like a winner for Canada. Bush wanted the matter closed before moving the US trade representative, Rob Portman, into the White House as budget director. Both leaders need a foreign-policy victory and both need to demonstrate strengthened ties. Faced with a deadline for an unfavorable ruling from a NAFTA tribunal, the timing seems perfect for an announcement of this kind.
Getting the duties returned to the Canadian logging industry will give Harper a huge political boost. In return, the ongoing lumber trade between the two countries will have better regulation to keep American companies from bankruptcy from subsidized price wars, allowing George Bush to save American jobs. Bush needs to make Canada a more visible ally; they are the largest trading partner of the US and our largest supplier of oil (trading spots often with Mexico at #2). Bush needs to highlight the Canadian relationship as a close friendship, and he has no better opportunity than with Harper at the helm in Ottawa. He had to bend on softwoods to give Harper the necessary domestic support for improved relations with DC.
The agreement still has to pass muster with the lumber industries of both countries, or the agreement will never see ratification. It appears designed to give enough protection to American loggers while giving Canadian loggers enough of the American market to keep everyone satisfied, if not exactly happy. Expect this agreement to get announced in the next couple of days and for the US and Canada to withdraw their grievances from the NAFTA boards forthwith.

One of the three key Sponsorship Programme figures facing criminal charges in the fraud conspiracy has had a prison sentence imposed on him after prosecutors appealed his initial sentencing. Paul Coffin, who pled guilty to 15 counts of fraud stemming from the $1.6 million of taxpayer money he collected from taxpayers, got sentenced to 18 months in prison earlier today (via Newsbeat1):

Montreal advertising executive Paul Coffin was sentenced to an 18-month prison term in a Quebec appeals court on Friday for his role in defrauding the federal government out of $1.5 million in sponsorship funds.
In May, Coffin pleaded guilty to 15 counts of fraud for his involvement in the sponsorship fiasco.
He initially received a two-year less a day conditional sentence of community service.
However, the Crown appealed that decision, saying the sentence was not enough to deter others from doing the same in the future.

I wrote about the ridiculous sentence given Coffin last year on September 19th in a post called “Steal Big, Risk Little”. Coffin had netted well over one and half million dollars from his exploitation of the Sponsorship Programme, and yet the Canadian court only forced him to repay one million dollars as part of his sentence. Essentially it gave Coffin a 35% profit margin on his fraud, proving that crime pays in Canada.
The court had also sentenced Coffin to two years of community service — speaking about the evils of fraud to college students, not picking up trash on highway embankments. He also had to endure a 9 pm curfew on weeknights, but apparently had no such restrictions on his weekends. Other than that and the felony conviction on his record, Coffin escaped punishment for his five-year theft of money from the government.
Prosecutors successfully argued that the purpose of sentencing involves not just rehabilitation, but actual punishment and deterrence. The appeals court agreed, critizing the sentencing judge for getting too wrapped up in Coffin’s personal life to render a proper judgment. The original court forgot that two parties had come to the bar for justice — Coffin and the Crown, representing the people. It was impossible to argue that the original sentence provided any justice for Canadians who just had their pockets picked.
This development does not bode well for the other two defendants in the Adscam case, Chuck Guité and Jean Brault. Brault also pled guilty to five separate counts of fraud which allowed him to steal a like amount, and his prospects for avoiding jail time appear slim indeed. Guité has pled not guilty and forced the Canadian government to prosecute the case; if he loses, he can expect an even tougher sentence.
Canadians will be impressed to see that someone will finally serve time for the worst scandal in recent Canadian memory. One wonders if the punishment will remain limited to these three cogs in a much larger money-laundering machine.