The committee rarely meets more than once a year — sometimes not at all — but its chair and vice-chair annually collect $11,200 and $5,600 respectively whether it meets or not.
UPDATE: Two days after The Huffington Post Canada reported that two senators were together earning $16,800 a year to chair a committee that rarely meets, the Conservative deputy leader in the Senate Claude Carignan announced he'll bring forward a motion next week stripping the Senate Selection committee's chair and vice-chair of their extra remuneration.
Now, chair Elizabeth Marshall has asked another Senate committee to study whether that practice is appropriate.
On Tuesday, the Standing committee met for the first time in 2013 to strip Senator Mike Duffy of his membership on two committees, Rules and Agriculture. The Selection committee is mandated to meet every parliamentary session to rubber stamp membership decisions on the Senate’s various committees. Before Tuesday, it hadn’t met since June 9, 2011 when it sat for 15 minutes. It didn’t meet in 2012 — although Marshall and her vice-chair, Liberal Senator Jim Munson, still earned extra money.
Marshall already collects a $135,200 salary and receives another $11,200 to serve as the government’s whip in the Senate. Munson, her counterpart, receives $6,600 to serve as the Liberal’s whip in addition to his $135,200 paycheque. The $11,200 and $5,600 they both earn to chair the Selection committee is on top of their remuneration.
Marshall told HuffPost Wednesday she had a brief meeting with Liberal Senator David Smith, the chair of the Standing Committee on Rules, Procedures and the Rights of Parliament, on Tuesday and asked him whether his committee could study her $11,200 annual top-up.
“I met with the Chair of the Standing Committee on Rules and discussed our conversation of last week. I requested that the Rules Committee look at the rules covering the Select Committee and the compensation attached to it,” she told HuffPost in an email.
“It is too early to give you an update but as soon as I know something, I will let you know,” she added.
NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus called the extra cash “outrageous.”
Gregory Thomas, the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, said the payments were “ridiculous” and called on the Senate to end the practice.
“They need to give the money back right away,” he said.
The Senate is already grappling with a legitimacy crisis.
In a speech to colleagues, the Government Leader in the upper house Marjory LeBreton said things in the Senate were going to change to bring the institution into the 21st century.
“The this-is-the-way-it-has-always-been-done just doesn’t cut it anymore,” LeBreton said while explaining a number of changes to the Senate's living and travel expense claims.
“The Senate of Canada, honourable colleagues, is not an old boys’ club,” she said. “It is a public institution that is meant to serve the public and ought to be accountable to the public. We must act and be seen to be acting in the public interest.”
Marshall, a former auditor general in Newfoundland and Labrador, said she was surprised to find out last week from HuffPost that the whips on the House of Commons side are not paid extra money to track committee memberships.
Membership lists in the House are also rubber stamped by another committee, Procedure and House Affairs, that is charged with studying a number of other substantive files.
Smith told HuffPost his committee will look into it but it might take a while. The Rules committee is currently studying the issue of an RCMP witness discouraged from testifying on workplace harassment by the Force.
“I'll have to discuss it with members of our committee but we will review it,” Smith said. “We have quite an agenda right now and several other things coming our way because of other controversies that you are aware of so it is not up to me to decide on the order."
Still, Smith said he felt “the other things are a little bit more pressing."
On Wednesday, the NDP launched a new campaigned aimed at Senate abolition.
NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair said his party would “work on” abolition if elected to government.
“Unlike Stephen Harper who talked about abolition before he formed government and went on to name the largest number of senators in Canadian history, we are going to actually do it,” Mulcair pledged.
Harper has made 59 Senate appointments since 2006. Fifty-seven Conservative senators have been appointed to the upper house, including two who chose to resign to run in a federal election but lost their bids and were promptly re-appointed. Former Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien appointed 75 senators to the red chamber.
“Nobody, given the news of the past months, is in favour of a simple status quo defence of the Senate,” Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau told reporters Wednesday. He said his plan, whatever it is, would be revealed in an election platform.
Conservative Senator Bob Runciman told HuffPost he hopes the Supreme Court will pronounce itself very quickly on the question of Senate abolition. Prime Minister Stephen Harper referred his reform plans to the top court earlier this year and also asked about the feasibility of abolition.
Opposition leaders, like Mulcair, are using Senate abolition for their own political purpose knowing full well it’s impossible to achieve, Runciman suggested.
“If the court confirms the difficulty (impossibility?) of abolition, opposition leaders and premiers who've advocated that position will be revealed as proponents of status quo,” he wrote in an email. ]]>Senate Expense Scandal: Tory Senators Speak Out About Crisistag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-22T12:19:57-04:002013-05-23T14:07:48-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/
“Out of respect for citizens, for taxpayers and especially for the institutions, if these people here erred, they should quit the Senate,” Quebec Senator Jean-Guy Dagenais told reporters Tuesday morning.
His colleague Senator Jacques Demers went further telling the media he is in an intense period of personal reflection and unsure he wants to remain a senator any longer.
“I want to see if I’m going to stay in the Senate. I love the Senate. I learned a lot in the last four years. I came here and didn’t know anything about politics and I didn’t understand anything about the Senate,” Demers said.
But the former Montreal Canadiens head coach said he and many of his colleagues, who work hard and lead honest lives, feel they are being painted with the same brush as certain senators accused of expensing thousands in inappropriate housing claims. It’s like if ninety-five per cent of senators are carrying the blame for what’s going on with five rotten apples, Demers suggested.
“There are so many lies flying around that I am sick. I wish people would just speak the truth. And if people lose their jobs because of it, so be it,” Demers said.
Quebecers and other Canadians who get up every morning and don’t know where their next meal will come from don’t need cheats in Ottawa, he suggested.
“It’s cheating. The $16 orange juice. Things like that are simply incredible. We are senators. We are proud to be senators, most of us were appointed because of something else we had accomplished something good in a our lives, and now we are placed in an exceptional position, we work 100 days a year, we are well paid, and now we’re going to go and enrich ourselves in inappropriate ways? It’s unacceptable for me,” he said.
Without pointing the finger at embattled senators Mike Duffy, Patrick Brazeau, Mac Harb and Pamela Wallin, Demers suggested that if some senators are guilty of what it is speculated that they have done, they should not only be turfed from caucus but “they should be fired.”
“You do not take money away (from taxpayers). If that’s the case, they should be gone, fired and forgotten,” he said.
Senator Nancy Greene Raine told Kamloops This Week Tuesday that she would step down if faced with the same allegations as Duffy.
"Personally, if it was me, I would resign," Raine is quoted saying.
Ontario Conservative Senator Bob Runciman, another Harper-appointee, told HuffPost the allegations are damaging to the Senate as an institution and its “current occupants.”
Story continues after slideshow
In addressing his caucus Tuesday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said: "I’m not happy, I’m very upset about some conduct we have witnessed — the conduct of some parliamentarians and the conduct of my own office."
Harper’s former chief of staff Nigel Wright is alleged to have given Duffy $90,000 to pay his debt to taxpayers in exchange for his silence and a promise that other Tory senators would “go easy” on him during a report on his questionable expenses.
Although Harper did not respond to the allegations directly, he urged senators and MPs to leave his caucus if they intended to use public office for their own benefit. He booted Duffy and Wallin last week. Wright resigned on Sunday saying he did not inform the Prime Minister “of the means by which” he paid Duffy’s tab to taxpayers.
“I did not get into politics to defend the Senate,” Harper said Tuesday, noting that his government had put Senate reform on the national agenda. When Harper tried to push that agenda through, however, his own senators — including many of the 57 he appointed since taking office in 2006 — balked at the Senate term limits and the election process. Faced with a review of its legislation in Quebec’s Court of Appeal, Harper decided to refer his reforms as well as the question of abolishing the Senate to the Supreme Court earlier this year.
“The Senate status quo is not acceptable. Canadians want the Senate to change,” Harper said Tuesday, adding that Canadians were asking the government to accelerate its efforts.
Runciman told HuffPost he thought the current situation might encourage the Supreme Court to “expedite their review,” confirm the difficulty or impossibility of abolition and provide a “clear road map” for governments to move towards timely and effective reform.”
Conservative Senator Hugh Segal suggested the upper chamber was facing a legitimacy crisis and a referendum on abolishing or reforming the Senate might be needed.
“(T)here has never been any democratic validation of the Senate in 145 years,” Segal wrote in an email to HuffPost.
So far, the Harper government’s approach in dealing with the crisis in the Senate and opposition party allegations that fraud may have taken place has been to revamp the upper chamber’s rules governing travel and living expenses.
Liberal Senator Colin Kenny wrote an op-ed in The Huffington Post Canada suggesting the new rules were punishing senators who actually use travel points to work and do not to abuse the system.
Kenny said he uses his travel points to meet with cops, judges, soldiers, educators, and customs officials on the front-line who don’t shy away from telling an opposition politician what’s really going on on the ground.
“Rather than confine senators to the Ottawa beltway — where government mouthpieces won't tell you anything that hasn't been vetted by a 20-something political aide in the prime minister's office — I believe the Senate should make travel and everything connected to travel more transparent,” he wrote.
The new rules, tabled in a report on May 9, will curb travel drastically by limiting a senator to a maximum of 12 trips annually (less depending on the distance and itinerary) taken outside a senator’s home province.
Senators will have to reveal the purpose of each trip but still won’t have to say who they are meeting with. Travel claims, such as mileage or taxis, will also, now, have to be backed up with records and receipts.
The Senate will also delete a rule that essentially stated senators were beyond reproach unless a majority of their colleagues thought they were acting improperly. The “honour” system — which the chair of the Internal Economy committee, Conservative Sen. David Tkachuk so fiercely defended just two years ago during damning audit that recommended senators not sign off on their own expenses — will now be eliminated.
Senators who claim a primary residence outside of Ottawa will have to show a provincial driver’s licence, health card and income tax forms to prove their residency outside the National Capital Region — rather than just say their primary residence is more than 100 kilometres away from the Senate.
New rules will also restrict a senator’s designated traveler to their spouse or partner and stipulate that person has to be travelling with the senator to enjoy the travel points.
The new rules won’t prevent cheating but the Senate needs to adopt them to deal with the current public outcry, one senator told HuffPost.
“None of it is going to stop anyone from cheating. None of it will,” the senator said. “If someone wants to file a false declaration, it’s only after a while that finance will notice it — if they see a pattern.”
The Liberal leader in the Senate James Cowan told his colleagues Tuesday evening that Canadians have not shied away from using colourful language to publicly express what they think of the Senate and senators.
“We cannot ignore them,” Cowan said. “It is critically important to re‑establish the confidence of Canadians in their public institutions.”]]>Mike Duffy Cheque: Unanswered Questions Remain Over Nigel Wright's $90,000 Gifttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-21T15:10:19-04:002013-05-22T09:18:18-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/Mike Duffy from Prime Minister Stephen Harper's right-hand man, Nigel Wright, who resigned Sunday amid an expense scandal that has rocked the party.
While the prime minister told his caucus he was “very upset” about the conduct of “some parliamentarians and the conduct of my own office,” Harper never mentioned Wright's name, Duffy or Pamela Wallin, another Conservative senator who resigned from the Tory caucus on Friday over her expenses.
The two senators were asked to step down from the Tory caucus last week or risk the public humiliation of being turfed out, The Huffington Post Canada has learned.
Here are a few questions which still need answers:
1. What did the prime minister know and when did he know it?
Perrin released a statement on Tuesday afternoon in which he said the CTV story was false and that he was "not consulted on" and "did not participate in" Wright's decision to reimburse Duffy's expenses. "I have never communicated with the Prime Minister on this matter," he said.
How could Conservative senators on the sub-committee reviewing Duffy’s expenses know to go easy on him if they weren’t directed from above? If they were directed by the PMO, who else in that office knew about the deal? How could the prime minister not know? Was Harper's new chief of staff, Ray Novak, aware of this plan?
If Wright honestly kept this information from Harper, how could the PM initially say he stood by his chief of staff? Does Harper accept responsibility for what happened?
In his resignation letter, Wright said he did not "advise" the prime minister "of the means by which" Duffy's expenses were repaid either before or after the fact. What does that mean? Was Harper kept in the dark about the type of payment (i.e. a cheque or a money order) or perhaps Wright did not tell him whether the money was a gift or a loan. The PMO insists the money was a gift, saying Wright never expected to be paid back.
Wright has not given any media interviews nor spoken publicly save for his statement. Duffy has avoided returning calls and emails. He told reporters who met him at the airport Monday to “stay tuned” for what he had to say. The Senate meets Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. ET.
2. If Nigel Wright gave Mike Duffy a $90,000 gift, why did Duffy fail to declare it? Why were lawyers involved if Wright honestly had no expectations of being repaid? And why did Duffy take out a bank loan?
The same day, however, the PMO fessed up that Wright had written a personal cheque to Duffy for $90,127. Initially, Conservative spinners suggested Wright and Duffy were friends and it was a personal gift. Then, last Friday, Harper's spokesman Andrew MacDougall said that, at the time, the PMO felt Duffy's debt to taxpayers had to be repaid immediately and suggested that was why Wright dug into his own savings.
The PMO says Duffy's claim that he secured a bank loan “came as a complete surprise."
If Wright had given Duffy a loan, then the chief of staff would have had to declare that to Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson. She is currently investigating Wright's payment.
If Wright’s money was indeed a gift, then Duffy would have had to declare it in public registry within 60 days of receiving it. It appears, he didn’t.
3. Was there a deal whereby Duffy would accept the money and in exchange stay quiet or not participate in an independent third-party audit? Was there a tit-for-tat whereby senators representing governing party would amend a committee report to spare embarrassment to one of their own — a senator who just happened to be a popular fundraiser?
According to CTV, a letter of understanding between Mike Duffy and someone, possibly the PMO or Wright, stipulated that a Senate investigation into Duffy's expenses would "go easy" on him if he publicly said he would repay the money and used the cash to pay off his debt to taxpayers. If there was in fact a deal, Wright's gift could run afoul of various rules aimed at preventing quid-pro-quo gifts to politicians.
Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird told the House of Commons Tuesday that as far as he knows there was no document and no agreement between Duffy and Wright.
"Our understanding is there is no such agreement," Baird said during question period.
The Huffington Post Canada, however, has learned that there was a verbal agreement between Wright and Duffy.
CTV reported the agreement stipulated Duffy would not have to participate in an audit into his expenses. A Senate committee looking into the issue sent Duffy, and senators Mac Harb and Patrick Brazeau’s expense claims to Deloitte for an independent reference into their housing and living expenses. Duffy did not cooperate with Deloitte auditors. In an April letter to Conservative Senator David Tkachuk, the chair of the Internal Economy committee, Duffy said he was prepared to participate but Tkachuk told him his participation was no longer needed.
Sources tell HuffPost that the committee reviewing an audit of Duffy’s expenses watered down their findings during an in-camera meeting.
In each report relating to Senators Mac Harb and Patrick Brazeau’s inappropriate housing expenses, a subcommittee of the Senate’s Standing Committee on Internal Economy, Budgets and Administration called the rules surrounding a senator’s primary and secondary residence “amply clear” and said both should reimburse living expenses.
“Your Subcommittee considers this language to be unambiguous and, plainly, if a Senator resides primarily in the NCR (National Capital Region), he or she should not be claiming living expenses for the NCR.”
The report into Duffy’s expenses — which was drafted by another subcommittee headed by Tkachuk — includes no such language. ]]>Senate Selection Committee Could Be The Most Expensive Meeting On Parliament Hilltag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-21T09:22:59-04:002013-05-21T11:16:31-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/
Two senators are each pocketing several thousand dollars annually to head a committee that meets once a year – and sometimes not at all.
Conservative Senator Elizabeth Marshall, the Tory whip, receives $11,200 annually to serve as the chair of the Senate’s selection committee. That is on top of her $135,200 salary and the $11,200 she receives to serve as the Government’s whip. Her counterpart, Senator Jim Munson, the Liberals’ whip, receives $5,600 to serve as the vice-chair of the selection committee in addition to his $135,200 paycheque and the $6,600 he receives as whip.
The Senate selection committee last met – for 15 minutes – on June 9, 2011, right after the federal election. The meeting was to establish membership lists for all the Senate’s other committees, although, in actual fact, they simply rubber stamped decisions that the party leaders’ offices had already made.
The committee didn’t meet at all in 2012. It’s first meeting of 2013 is scheduled for Tuesday, a date that didn’t appear on the schedule until after HuffPost made inquiries last week about the committee’s work.
“For a committee where the chair is making $33,000 a meeting, it’s outrageous,” NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus told HuffPost.
Gregory Thomas, the federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, called the practice “unacceptable.”
It’s “ridiculous” to pay them annually for chairing a committee that doesn’t even meet some years, he said. “They need to give the money back right away. And they need to end the practice.”
Conservative Senator Don Plett told The Huffington Post Canada he was not aware that Marshall and Munson were collecting extra pay to preside over the selection committee. Plett said he didn’t get any money to serve as deputy chair of the weekly veterans affairs subcommittee.
“I think I should definitely get extra money,” he said half-jokingly.
There are a lot of rules that need to be changed in the Senate, Plett added.
Should chairs that do a lot of extra work be compensated? “I think they should, if they do a lot of extra work...There should be some overall reforms,” he said.
Marshall told HuffPost that “things can change” but that, right now, this is the way the Selection committee works.
“It’s in the rules of the Senate, and the salary is in the legislation, I can only tell you what I do,” she said.
Marshall said she views her role as committee chair as being one that ensures Conservative senators show up to the committees to which they are assigned, and she views her role as whip as being one that ensures that Tory senators are present in the upper chamber when they have to be.
Munson told HuffPost the same thing.
“Each side has a shared responsibility for the membership selection of committees, the daily management of the committees and their effective functioning. There are procedures in place where I can fill the committees on a daily or weekly basis. Memberships often changes. Because the work of the committees is of such value, I continuously monitor their work,” Munson wrote in an email.
Munson said his primary function as whip is “managing caucus for Senate sittings, votes, question period, helping prepare opposition policy, and office accommodation.”
On the House of Commons’ side, both functions are performed by the party whips. There is no selection committee. Instead, membership on Commons committees is voted upon and changed when required at the procedure and House affairs committee – which meets twice a week, has a relatively busy workload and which also studies legislation. Party whips monitor the attendance of their MPs in the House and in committees.
Angus said the selection committee is a further example of the Senate’s being “an old boys’ club filled with partisan hacks who devise elaborate ways of spending taxpayers money on themselves.”
“What’s even more outrageous is Canadians have no ability to find out what they are up to, to hold them to account or even to fire them for this type of abuse,” he said. “When you have a system that doesn’t have any accountability, this is the type of abuse that becomes normal.”
Before the federal election was called in March, 2011, the Senate selection’s previous meeting had been on March 4, 2010. It met that time for 21 minutes. Now retired Conservative senator Consiglio Di Nino was then chair. Munson was still vice-chair. In 2009, the standing seletion committee met three times – for one minute on Sept. 30, for 20 minutes on Feb. 10 and for four minutes on Feb. 3. It did not meet in 2008.
Last year, a firestorm erupted in Alberta after it was discovered that taxpayers were footing the bill – worth several hundred thousand dollars – for 21 MLAs to sit on a committee that had not met in more than three years. Public pressure forced many MLAs who had received $1,000 a month to sit on the committee to give the money back. ]]>Ray Novak Replacing Nigel Wright As Stephen Harper's Chief Of Staff May Indicate Further Changestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-19T15:59:35-04:002013-05-19T16:48:37-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/Ray Novak as the prime minister’s new chief of staff could signal larger changes in Stephen Harper’s office.
Novak, 36, has been at Harper’s side for over a decade. Up until Sunday, he served as Harper’s principal secretary.
Fiercely loyal to the prime minister and discreet, Novak once lived on top of Harper’s garage at Stornoway when he was leader of the official Opposition.
"This will be a really big change for Ray. He's always had a lot of influence but not a lot of responsibility," one source told HuffPost Canada.
Former Conservative staffer Jason Lietaer said Novak is “competent and trusted by all those who know him and have worked with him.”
“He blends in with the scenery, by choice, but don't ever mistake that humility for the fact that he's as good a strategist and tactician as they come,” he wrote in an email to HuffPost Canada.
A colleague of his described him as "even-handed and level-headed" and respectful of caucus.
"He won't be a mico-manager. He'll build a good team of Harper loyalists and will let them do their jobs," Novak's colleague said.
Another source noted, "Whether he wants it or not, Ray is the right man for the job."
Story continues below slideshow
After news broke that Harper’s former chief of staff Nigel Wright had cut a $90,000 cheque to Sen. Mike Duffy in order to facilitate the repayment of inappropriate living expenses, Novak brought in former PMO issues management director Jenni Byrne, now the director of political operations at the Conservative Party, to help handle the crisis.
The move could be indicative of further changes to come, some of Novak’s colleagues speculated.
Although Wright was praised for his smarts, some Conservatives say there was a feeling that the PMO was not as political as it should be. Novak is expected to change the tide in preparation for the next election.
Several sources declined to speak to The Huffington Post Canada about Novak on the record. The Ottawa Valley native doesn’t like the spotlight and shies away from it. He keeps a low profile on purpose. Friends and staff describe him as very hardworking – a man who is the office late in the evenings and on weekends.
He is on the right of the Conservative Party and has been involved in partisan politics since his university days. He was a young Reform Party activist. He did his undergraduate studies at the University of Western Ontario and had former Harper’s chief of staff Ian Brodie as one of his professors. He moved to Calgary to pursue a master’s degree in political science.
Despite being on the right, sources say Novak is not a social conservative. One colleague described him as “pragmatic.”
Novak is a staunch monarchist. He was behind the decision to rename the navy the Royal Canadian Navy. He is said to have close relations with Buckingham Palace and was instrumental in organizing several visits by the Royal Family to Canada.]]>Mike Duffy Resignation: Senator Leaves Caucus, Will Sit As Independenttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-16T21:35:05-04:002013-05-17T09:36:01-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/
In a statement late Thursday, Duffy said his presence had become a "significant distraction" to his caucus colleagues and he would step aside, to sit as an independent senator, pending the resolution of certain questions.
"Throughout this entire situation I have sought only to do the right thing," Duffy wrote. "I look forward to all relevant facts being made clear in due course, at which point I am hopeful I will be able to rejoin the Conservative caucus."
A government source told HuffPost there were a "growing number of questions" about Duffy's conduct and he would have to answer to them as an independent senator.
The Prime Minister's office made it clear Thursday that Stephen Harper was standing by his chief of staff, Nigel Wright, but wasn't prepared to go out on a limb for Duffy.
“Nigel will not resign,” Harper’s press secretary Carl Vallée said. “He has the confidence of the prime minister.”
Wright personally cut a $90,000 cheque to Duffy this winter allowing him to refund inappropriate housing expenditures he’d charged to the Senate before a third-party audit was to begin a study into his expenses.
A Conservative insider said Duffy tugged on the heartstrings of Wright, a multi-millionaire who was concerned by Duffy’s debt load and heart condition and who dipped into his personal funds to help make the senator’s problem go away.
There was intense internal pressure for Duffy to resign -- although several source told HuffPost he was not asked to step down.
“At present time, Senator Duffy is a member of caucus,” Vallée told HuffPost late Thursday afternoon.
Several sources said it was a matter of time before Duffy was shown the door or took it.
“I don’t understand why he hasn’t resigned yet,” a fellow Conservative senator told HuffPost Thursday. “At the very least, he should resign from caucus.”
“Nobody is happy with this situation,” he added. “People are displeased and uneasy. His behaviour reflects badly on the Senate as an institution as well as on all of his colleagues.”
Conservative Senator Don Plett told HuffPost he didn't think Duffy should leave the Tory caucus nor should he be shown the door.
“I think Mike Duffy, as anybody else, deserves due diligence and don’t think that has been exhausted yet. And so, I do not have any issues with Mike Duffy staying as one of my Senate colleagues,” Plett said.
Duffy, a former broadcaster and a Harper senator since 2009, may be in trouble on several fronts. The Senate’s conflict of interest code bars senators from receiving “any gift or benefit, directly or indirectly, that could reasonably be considered to relate to the senator’s position.”
As an exception, senators can receive gifts that fall within the “customary standards of hospitality” but they have to declare anything over $500 in a public registry, and Duffy failed to do so.
Vallée described Wright’s gesture as a gift saying: “Nigel did not expect to be repaid.”
CTV, however, reported it had an email from Duffy on Tuesday contradicting the PMO. In it, Duffy claimed he took out a loan from the Royal Bank and that "Nigel played no role.”
The PMO insisted Harper was not told of the deal between the two men before CTV broke the news of the pact Tuesday.
The Senate Ethics Officer Lyse Ricard would not say whether she is investigating Duffy.
NDP ethics critic Charlie Angus wrote to her Thursday asking for an investigation into the Duffy-Wright deal.
“It goes without saying that a cheque for such a large amount is far from a customary standard of hospitality, nor a normal expression of courtesy,” Angus wrote in a letter.
The NDP MP also suggested that Duffy, Wright, or both may have breached section 16 of the Parliament of Canada Act which prohibits a senator from receiving compensation for any services rendered.
The RCMP would not say whether it was investigating the $90,000 gift. Cpl. Lucy Shorey said it was not in the RCMP’s practice to “neither confirm nor deny” who or what is the subject of any investigation.
CBC suggested Thursday that Duffy also appeared to improperly claim he was on Senate business during the last federal election when he was in fact campaigning for the Conservatives in the Greater Toronto Area.
The PMO is reviewing Duffy’s expense claims from the 2011 campaign, CBC reported.
The revelations were found in a Deloitte audit into Duffy’s primary and secondary residence. A long-time Ottawa-area resident, the Conservative senator came under fire earlier this year for charging taxpayers living expenses for his home in the suburb of Kanata.
Duffy claimed his cottage in Prince Edward Island as his primary residence in order to receive up to $22,000 in annual housing and living allowances while in the National Capital Region.
A Senate committee calculated he owed the upper chamber $90,172.24 in inappropriate expenses.
In a Feb. 22 interview with CBC Charlottetown, Duffy said he and his wife were going to “voluntarily pay back my living expenses related to the house we have in Ottawa.”
But in an interview with Global News on April 18, Duffy seemed to suggest he would wait until the Deloitte audit was completed before sending in a cheque.
A day later, Duffy and the Senate both confirmed he had reimbursed taxpayers $90,172.24 for living allowances.
Duffy did not return calls or emails for comment.
On Wednesday, the Office of the Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner said Mary Dawson was “reviewing” Wright’s involvement in the repayment of Duffy’s expenses.]]>Harper Government Media Monitoring: Opposition Accuses Tories Of Spying On MPstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-09T18:48:00-04:002013-05-10T14:14:44-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/The Huffington Post Canada revealed Conservatives had spent $23 million on media monitoring in two years — including millions to track their own backbench MPs.
“Instead of helping young people and middle class families, the Conservatives are wasting more than $3,000 a day of taxpayers’ money to spy on their own MPs,” Liberal House leader Dominic LeBlanc said in the House of Commons.
NDP Treasury Board critic Mathieu Ravignat questioned how the Conservatives were unable to trace billions in spending but were champions of keeping a close eye on their own MPS.
“We now know that they are pushing this to the point of wasting millions of taxpayers’ dollars monitoring the press coverage of their own backbench MPs,” Ravignat said. “It’s ridiculous.”
Public Works Minister Rona Ambrose defended the government’s use of media monitoring services saying opposition parties use them as well.
“We do want to be aware of all of the media reporting about our members of Parliament because we are very proud of the work that they are doing,” Ambrose told MPs. “They appear in many articles across the media, doing excellent work on behalf of the government, and we are happy to receive those clippings.”
NDP MP Charlie Angus told reporters the Tories are probably keeping tabs on their backbench because these are the MPs causing the prime minister “a great deal of trouble.”
“They’re certainly not following the party line. They’re running off on tangents all the time. So obviously the Prime Minister’s Office is trying to keep tabs on their behaviour,” he said.
But if Harper wants to do that, Angus suggested, the Conservative party should foot the bill, not taxpayers.
“If the party wants to do that, the party can do that certainly. Google search doesn’t cost anything, I can tell you that much,” he said.
Liberal MP Joyce Murray suggested the federal government should hire a student to help teach Tories how to use Google Alerts — a free service that allows anyone to track online media stories with any desired search terms.
PCO spokesman Raymond Rivet told HuffPost that the department uses a number of media monitoring tools “including alerts.”
He said the federal government uses external supplies to “take advantage of new technologies and approaches to media monitoring.”
The prime minister’s spokesman Andrew MacDougall told HuffPost PCO tracks the coverage of their backbench MPs because they make announcements on behalf of the government all the time. “Of course the government wants to know what kind of coverage gets generated from those announcements,” he said.
On Thursday, many MPs — including those in opposition — contacted The Huffington Post to enquire if they were on the list of names being tracked. The PCO said Wednesday it intended to monitor all Conservative backbench MPs, but 37 MPs were left off.
Several who were omitted weren’t sure whether to be pleased or hurt that they had not been included.
“I’m a little surprised to hear that I’m flying under their radar,” outspoken Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber told HuffPost. “I guess I’ll have to up my game a little!”
Conservative backbencher Jay Aspin, who was left off the list of names and search terms, hypothesized the government must like what he’s saying.
“I don’t know why I am not on the list. Maybe they can trust what I say?” he told HuffPost.
Several Tory backbenchers contacted Wednesday expressed shock and surprise that they were being monitored by their leadership.
“I honestly don’t know anything about this at all,” said Barrie, Ont., Conservative MP Patrick Brown, whose name was on the list. “Governments have done media monitoring for years to track what issues are relevant but I am not sure why I would be followed or tracked.”
On Thursday, NDP House leader Nathan Cullen said the Conservatives’ “love for control of everything and everyone” had gone too far.
“One would think that law-abiding citizens like my friend from Barrie should not have to worry about being spied on by his own government,” he said.]]>Le gouvernement Harper a dépensé plus de 2,4 millions $ pour surveiller ses propres députéstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-09T16:23:02-04:002013-05-09T16:23:45-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/ Le Huffington Post.
Les noms de 65 députés conservateurs figurent sur une liste de termes recherchés par les services de surveillance d’avril 2011 à décembre 2012. Tous les députés québécois du Parti conservateur ont été surveillés. Des membres de l’opposition incluant l’actuel chef du Parti libéral Justin Trudeau, le chef du Parti néodémocrate Thomas Mulcair et l’ancien chef du Parti libéral Bob Rae figurent aussi sur cette liste.
Les membres du Parlement et employés contactés par Le Huffington Post mercredi étaient choqués d’apprendre qui étaient les politiciens visés.
Le député conservateur Patrick Brown, figurant sur cette liste, reste perplexe quant aux raisons qui ont poussé le gouvernement à la surveiller. Ce dernier soutient que la surveillance médiatique n’était utilisée dans le passé que pour mettre le doigt sur les enjeux important, susceptibles d’intéresser le gouvernement.
Le député libéral, John McCallum, qui a demandé à obtenir le contrat de surveillance et la liste de recherche, croit que les contribuables ne devraient pas avoir à payer pour ces dépenses du gouvernement conservateur.
Le représentant du Bureau du Conseil privé, Raymond Rivet, soutient que cette pratique n’avait pas pour but de surveiller les parlementaires, mais bien de s’assurer que les services de surveillances médiatiques couvraient toute l’information nécessaire au cas où quelque chose intéresserait le gouvernement.
«Les conservateurs gaspillent l’argent des contribuables à raison de près de 3,000 dollars par jour, pour espionner leurs propres députés», s'est indigné le leader à la chambre du Parti libéral, Dominic Leblanc.
Le leader à la chambre du Parti néodémocrate, Nathan Cullen, croit que les députés «ne devraient pas avoir à s’inquiéter d’être surveillés par leur propre gouvernement.»
«Ce gouvernement semble penser qu’il est au-dessus de toute responsabilité. Quand est-ce que le Premier ministre assumera sa responsabilité face à ce stupéfiant niveau d’incompétence?» s’est interrogé le député néodémocrate Charlie Angus.
Le Ministre des Travaux publics, Rona Ambrose, a soutenu que le gouvernement gardait une trace du travail des parlementaires «parce qu’il en était très fier.»
Le porte-parole de Harper, Andrew MacDougall, affirme quant à lui que puisque les députés parlent au nom du gouvernement, il est logique «que le gouvernement veuille savoir quel genre de couverture génère leurs déclarations.»
]]>Harper Government Spends Millions Monitoring Press Of Own MPstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-08T19:54:25-04:002013-05-09T10:18:31-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/
The names of 65 Conservative backbench MPs — or just about 64 per cent of all Tory MPs who have no ministerial or any parliamentary secretary duties — are included in a list of search terms the federal government paid third-party contractors to monitor in news media from April, 2011 to December, 2012, although some of the terms were also monitored in early 2013.
MPs and staff in every office The Huffington Post Canada contacted Wednesday were bewildered to learn who was named on a list of politicians the Privy Council Office (PCO) tracks. (The PCO is the prime minister’s department).
“I honestly don’t know anything about this at all,” said Ontario Conservative MP Patrick Brown, whose name was on the list.
Brown said he had no idea why the government would be monitoring him. “Governments have done media monitoring for years to track what issues are relevant but I am not sure why I would be followed or tracked,” he told HuffPost.
“You know I have worked here for 29 years and this is the first time I’ve ever heard of this,” said Mary Ann Tink, parliamentary assistant to Ontario Conservative MP Daryl Kramp.
“How? … Is it because of the Indian Act possibly?” asked Saskatchewan MP Rob Clarke. Clarke tabled a controversial private member’s bill calling on the federal government to work with First Nations to replace what he views as an outdated Indian Act. “That is what I would guess is their rationale,” he said of the monitoring.
Conservative MP Stephen Woodworth said he was unaware of the reasons why the government would monitor him but added that he wasn’t concerned. Woodworth garnered national headlines last year when he introduced a motion to establish a House of Commons committee to study the question of when life begins — a move many saw as the first step toward restrictive abortion laws.
Several Tory backbenchers who spoke out last month against their government’s decision to ban British Columbia MP Mark Warawa from speaking freely in the House of Commons — MPs such as Kyle Seeback, Michael Chong, Leon Benoit, Brent Rathgeber and John Williamson — do not figure on the PCO’s 2011-2012 list of people targeted for monitoring.
Conservative MP Brian Jean, who is on the list, said he’s not sure why he was flagged, but also said he isn’t troubled by it.
Story continues under gallery.
“They must be interested in what their colleagues are doing, right? I mean the government must be. It seems to make sense from a party position that you would be interested in what your members are saying,” he said.
“It seems abundantly reasonable, and obviously legal so I would say it is not a big deal.”
Liberal MP John McCallum, who requested the media monitoring contracts and the search terms from the Conservative government, said taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for the Conservatives to babysit their own MPs.
“Is this Big Brother looking over them?” McCallum asked.
PCO spokesman Raymond Rivet insisted the federal government was not monitoring MPs.
“We are not monitoring MPs per se, we are just trying to make sure that they (the media monitoring services) capture (everything) if there is something that is of interest to us,” Rivet told HuffPost.
The PCO uses a wide range of key words, including MPs’ and ministers’ names as well as specific subjects and government programs to help suppliers identify relevant reporting on talk radio and news programs, he said.
“Part of it is monitoring for the effectiveness of government comm(unication)s but also part of it is to identify issues. If we see something coming out of wherever, that is a flag for us.”
All Conservative MPs were meant to be included, Rivet added. “Things may have been missed. It was our intention to include everyone,” he said. (Most opposition MPs are not being tracked according to the documents tabled Monday).
McCallum doesn’t buy the department’s answers.
“Finding out what the MPs are saying in their local papers (and) presumably finding out whether the MPs are saying things they should not be saying — that means monitoring to me, whether you like that word or not,” he said.
The Prime Minister’s Office came down harshly on Conservative David Wilks last year after the B.C. MP was caught telling his local paper he was prepared to vote against his government’s budget as long as some of his other colleagues stood beside him.
Wilks wasn’t on the PCO’s monitoring list, but Rivet suggested the PMO might have their own list.
“I know there is other monitoring that goes on out there that might focus more on the political but that is not our focus,” Rivet said.
Many of the individuals tracked were ministers and parliamentary secretaries as well as opposition critics. Justin Trudeau, who was not Liberal leader at the time of the request, was not only being monitored by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada for his critic role, but also by the Privy Council Office. NDP leader Thomas Mulcair and then-Liberal leader Bob Rae were also on the list.
Last November, The Canadian Press revealed that the department of Citizenship and Immigration spent almost $750,000 monitoring ethnic media over the past three years, including assessments of election campaign events and "perceptions" of minister Jason Kenney.
The documents tabled this week reveal some interesting search terms requested by departments.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade was not only monitoring media stories involving their ministers “John Baird” and “Ed Fast,” but it was also keeping an eye on all stories involving “Maher Arar,” six years after a commission of inquiry cleared him of wrongdoing and found the RCMP passed misleading information to U.S. authorities labelling him a terrorist. In 2002, the Americans sent Arar, who was transiting through the States after a holiday in Tunisia, to his birth country of Syria, where he reported being tortured. An Ontario judge who led the commission recommended Arar be awarded $12.5 million in compensation.
DFAIT was also keeping track of stories dealing with “Omar Khadr” and retired Supreme Court judge Frank “Iacobucci,” who served as commissioner of an internal inquiry into the alleged torture of three Arab-Canadians. They did not monitor any stories involving Deepak Obhrai, Baird’s parliamentary secretary.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story erroneously suggested the federal government was monitoring spiritual author Deepak Chopra. The reference has been removed.]]>Harper Government's Palestine Stance At UN Opposed By Many Canadians: Documentstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-08T06:38:04-04:002013-05-08T08:02:55-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/against granting Palestine status as a non-member observer state at the United Nations.
Of the 365 Canadians who wrote to Harper between Nov. 29 and Dec. 31, 2012, after the historic UN vote, the overwhelming majority — 300, 82 per cent — were adamantly opposed to the Conservative government’s position. They used words such as “horrified,” “disgusted,” “saddened,” “ashamed” and “disappointed” to express their feelings, according to documents obtained under the Access to Information Act.
On Nov. 29, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly — 138 in favour, nine opposed and 41 abstentions — to upgrade Palestine’s status at the UN from “observer” to “non-member observer state.” Canada sided with Israel, the United States and six others in opposing the move. While largely symbolic, the status change would provide “a birth certificate to the reality of the State of Palestine,” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said. Israel saw the move as a “shortcut” to Palestinian statehood that would impede negotiations between Jerusalem and Ramallah.
Canada’s vote against the Palestinian Authority’s bid for recognition did not sit well with many correspondents.
Only 62 people — 17 per cent of letter and email writers — sided with the government’s position. Three emails were neutral, with residents wanting to know why Canada had sided with the minority of countries that had opposed the Palestinian desire for public acknowledgment of its statehood.
A person writing from British Columbia said: “The vote yesterday at the UN has clearly placed Canada among the hawks and imperialists.... There may be some Canadians (mostly Jews and Jewish owned businesses) who support your view on Palestine but I wish to be counted amongst those who do not.” (Names are redacted in the documents to protect privacy).
“[A]s a Canadian and a Jew, I am embarrassed to say that I am a Canadian due to your position taken on the UN vote re: Palestine,” wrote another person, who urged Harper to listen and be a leader rather than a follower.
A person from Saskatchewan, who also professed embarrassment over Canada’s vote, asked: “What is your response to the Israeli resumption of building new settlements?”
Canada refused to condemn Israel’s decision to build 3,000 homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — a plan announced a day after the UN General Assembly vote. The White House said the settlements were counterproductive and would make it more difficult to resume negotiations and achieve a two-state solution. Canada, however, stood silent for days.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW SLIDESHOW
The prime minister’s spokesman, Andrew MacDougall, refused to say whether Harper had broached the issue with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a phone call on Dec. 1. On CBC, the following week, Deepak Obhrai, the parliamentary secretary for Foreign Minister John Baird, said unilateral action, by either side, would not enhance the peace process.
A B.C. resident wrote of being “ashamed” of Canada and our “petulant” response to recall our representative in Palestine for discussions after we didn’t get our way.
“In early November, I was in Palestine with a group with focus on International Law and Human Rights. … and I [was] appalled by the treatment we were shown of the Palestinians by Israelis,” the letter writer said.
In a speech to the General Assembly on Nov. 29, Baird said Canada strongly opposed the resolution because it was a unilateral action that would hamper negotiations toward a two-state solution.
“This resolution will not advance the cause of peace or spur a return to negotiations. Will the Palestinian people be better off as a result? No. On the contrary, this unilateral step will harden positions and raise unrealistic expectations while doing nothing to improve the lives of the Palestinian people,” Baird said.
“You have mentioned that you believe in two state solution, then why oppose statehood for Palestinians?” one person emailed the evening after Baird spoke. “This is one of the pillars of the solution is it not? It will not invalidate any peace negotiations.”
Some residents, however, wrote to say Harper and Baird’s actions had made them proud to be Canadian.
“I know that many people are complaining, but I really think that good people are happy about what Baird did. I feel that everyone who really knows what is going on in the Middle East is rejoicing with the way we voted. And thumbs up to the Czech Republic, the U.S. and the others that voted no,” a resident of Alberta said.
One person sent a handwritten note on flowery stationery thanking Harper for “taking a stand” and voting no. “Please continue to stand with Israel,” the person wrote, underlining each word.
“The UN is a useless body and consists of terrorists and dictators. It has become a battle front for the countries versus Israel. Thank you for seeing who these organizations are and for what they stand,” wrote a resident from Quebec.
Several urged Harper to stop sending any aid to the Palestinian territories.
“[C]ancel all aid to any country except Israel...including those Nations that get our Aid but supported this resolution. CANCEL IT ALL !! These states must learn to stop this crap,” wrote one person in an email.
The bulk of the messages, however, were firmly opposed to Harper’s decision. “I am a long time support[er] of the Conservative Government. I was very happy on your re-election,” one person said. “But I am concerned at the recent Canadian stand on opposing vote for Palestinian[s]...Its embarrassing to see we stand in opposition to the righteous path.”
Many emails sent in the days leading up to the vote urged Harper to support Palestinian statehood.
“Tomorrow is the vote on this & I certainly hope you and your cabinet have a rethink,” wrote one person from B.C.
“Please don’t embarrass us anymore,” wrote another person whose letter was heavily redacted.
An Access to Information co-ordinator, citing restrictions on the release of personal information, said personal insults directed at Harper, Baird or other members of cabinet had been blacked out.
“[Blank] and your Government are an International Disgrace and I wait with eager anticipation to [blank],” reads one person’s redacted letter.
Carleton University political science professor Mira Sucharov said she believes the Conservatives’ “unwavering loyalty” to Israel, which has deepened over time, is based on a belief in the “rightness” of Israel’s mission, not on a partisan calculation.
The Conservative government honestly believes that recognizing Palestinian statehood at the UN is inappropriate and unhelpful unilateral action, she said. The Tories’ attitude toward Israel has little to do with courting the Jewish vote and more to do with sharing the same world view, Sucharov added.
“If it were about numbers, the Jewish community in Canada is much smaller than other communities that would have natural allegiances to the Palestinian cause,” she said.
But for a few seats in Toronto and Montreal, where the Jewish vote is concentrated, Sucharov said, the Conservatives’ pro-Israeli positions could actually hurt the party electorally with the larger but dispersed Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities, who believe Canada has lost its status as an honest broker.
Several letter writers said public opinion polls suggest that Canadians strongly favour support for Palestine. Several recent polls, however, indicate that Canadians want a middle-of-the-road policy.
A CBC/Nanos survey in December suggested that 48 per cent of Canadians want a Middle East policy that favours neither Israel nor Palestine.
An Environics survey in 2011 had similar results. Half of those surveyed, 51 per cent, said they believed Canada’s policy in the Middle East struck the right balance, while 23 per cent — a five per cent rise from 2008 — said the federal government’s policy was “too pro-Israel.” Those who felt Ottawa was too close with the Jewish state tended to be educated (with a university degree) or from Quebec.
Of the nine French-language letters sent to Harper’s office in late November and December on this issue, six were strongly opposed to the prime minister’s position.
The results may not be surprising. According to a BBC survey in 2012, most Canadians — 59 per cent — said they viewed Israel in a negative light, with only 25 per cent saying they viewed Israel’s influence as being mainly positive.
Ottawa seems to pride itself on the fact it has never surveyed Canadians for their thoughts on the Middle East. The Privy Council Office — the prime minister’s department — and Foreign Affairs both confirmed Monday that they have never polled on the question of Israel and Palestine.
Baird told reporters last month during a visit in the West Bank that Ottawa does not make foreign policy decisions “based on public opinion polls.”
“We don’t take positions ... based on what is popular. We make decisions based on what we think is right and wrong,” he said in April.
“Less than one percent of Canadians side with Hezbollah,” the report also stated.]]>Experimental Lakes Area: Lake 227 Research Could Be Saved, Scientists Saytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-07T17:59:57-04:002013-05-07T22:50:32-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/
They just want access to a road, the ability to get in a boat and keep their research going by filling a barrel with phosphoric acid that will slowly drip into Ontario’s Lake 227.
They don’t want any money — they already have a federal grant through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). They’re not even expecting access to a field station the federal government mothballed after renovating it with Economic Action Plan money.
They just want to keep 44 years of unique research into lake eutrophication — an ecosystem-wide fertilization experiment — going until Ottawa decides what it wants to do with the Experimental Lakes Area (ELA), an outdoor laboratory in northwestern Ontario consisting of 58 lakes, laboratories and living quarters which is widely credited for helping solve North America’s acid rain problem in the 1970s and 1980s. The federal government announced last year, it was shutting down the facility on March 31, 2013.
Ottawa is currently in talks with the government of Ontario and the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a third party that could operate the site. Manitoba has also said it might kick in “resources” — if Ottawa maintains a presence in the project. But the federal government has been pretty firm it doesn’t see a role for its scientists at the ELA.
“It’s not a lot we’re asking,” Lewis Molot, a professor of environmental studies at York University, told The Huffington Post Canada Tuesday. “Even if we don’t manage to get any water samples, at least we’ll know that the lake will be fertilized when we get in, in 2014, if the government gets into some sort of agreement and keeps it open. We will be able to continue with an uninterrupted data set of some 40 odd years.”
If scientists aren’t allowed to access Lake 227 this year, their research could be jeopardized, he said.
“The lake will start to recover,” Molot said, and scientists from then on won’t know what to attribute any changes that occur in the ecosystem to because a whole year will have passed without any fertilization and without any monitoring.
“We just want continuity,” he said.
The Conservative government, however, is unsympathetic to their pleas.
Fisheries Minister Keith Ashfield’s director of communications Erin Filliter said the federal government can’t say whether scientists will be given road passes this year to Lake 227 because Ottawa is deep in negotiations with a potential third party operator.
“I can’t give you details at all at this point because of negotiations with a third party,” Filliter said. “We have a confidentially agreement with a potential third party operator (and) that confidentiality agreement covers all of this so we can’t provide you additional details.”
Ottawa requested the confidentiality agreement.
“As soon as the department is in a position to speak to the scientist, they certainly will,” Filliter told HuffPost.
The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources which owns the road says it needs approval from the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in order to allow researchers to access the ELA.
Diane Orihel, a PhD candidate with the University of Alberta’s Department of Biological Sciences, has been conducting research at the ELA for several years.
She said the research done at Lake 227 is immensely important to the health of Lake Winnipeg and Lake Erie, which are both experiencing record-breaking algal blooms.
“We are trying to fix lakes across Canada that are suffering from algal blooms,” she said. The blooms are blooms of cyanobacteria, she explained, a type of algae that forms like mats on the water surface and looks like green paint. “They are a human health concern because many of these species of cyanobacteria produce liver and brain toxins,” she said.
In terms of economic costs, Orihel said, the algal blooms are also responsible for depleting oxygen in lakes which can cause fish kills. They also reduce property values for cottages and residences. “Who wants to have green paint washing up on their beach?” she said.
With a file from the Canadian Press]]>Temporary Foreign Workers: Abuse, Exploitation Could Be Solved With Immigration Fix, Experts Saytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-04T08:28:59-04:002013-05-04T08:29:02-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/
While some argued the foreign workers program is necessary to respond to employers’ needs, others said the TFW Program is so flawed the only solution is to scrap it.
Any low-skilled labour needs should be filled by immigrants already in the country or by an increased number of new refugees, one stakeholder said.
Yet others warn the TFW Program could lead to an explosion of illegal immigrants in the country, if temporary workers aren’t given a pathway to permanent resident status.
“We need to start to have an adult conversation in Canada about the world of work,” Dan Kelly, the president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB), told HuffPost this week.
“There are a whole bunch of jobs that Canadians really just don’t want to do. A lot of places in Canada where Canadians just don’t really want to live and (yet) we don’t really want foreign workers to come in and do those jobs either. Something is not going to work.”
Canada tells the world’s best and brightest to come over with their PhDs and MDs and set up shop, but when many get here they have trouble having their qualifications recognized and they end up “miserable” driving taxis or working as cleaners because those are the only jobs available, he said.
At the same time, temporary foreign workers who have gained Canadian experience and language skills are only allowed to stay in Canada for four years.
“We have to say goodbye to them, when the employer is saying, ‘Gosh, I wish I could have hung on to that person.’ ... And then we bring another PhD to work in a restaurant or drive a taxi and we somehow think that that is a better system,” Kelly said.
“Right now, we have a very dishonest immigration system,” he added.
The CFIB has called on the Conservative government to change the immigration system to target lower-skilled occupations and provide all temporary foreign workers access to permanent residency — a measure that’s only available to some workers.
Joey Calugay from the Immigrant Workers Centre in Montreal said most temporary foreign workers want to stay in Canada. In many cases, these workers were duped into believing the TFW program was an entry point to immigration, he said.
“Those are the promises that are being made to them when they are going through the process,” Calugay said. “I think many are misled. I think many don’t even understand that this program exists and is temporary, and (many of them) don’t have a chance to apply for permanent residence.”
During a recent training session, landscapers from the Philippines, Jamaica and Costa Rica were surprised to find out there was no way for them, as low-skilled workers, to apply for permanent residency in Quebec, he said. “That is the normal reaction that we get.”
If temporary foreign workers were allowed to apply for citizenship or if the immigration system allowed more lower-skilled applicants, it would ensure safer work conditions, Calugay said.
Some temporary foreign workers are exploited because their work permits are tied to the employer who brought them to Canada, he said. “(That) means they are not going to complain or if they do complain they could lose their job … so a lot of them don’t.”
The Immigrant Workers Centre worked with Bangladeshi cooks employed in a restaurant in Longueuil, Que., who earned less than $4 an hour. The Centre documented farm workers who were let go after protesting severely unsafe work conditions and a butcher who was fired for demanding thousands in back pay.
“Opening up (the immigration system) to low-skill categories would certainly address the precariousness of their situation of being tied to one employer,” Calugay said.
Sharryn Aiken, an associate dean in the law faculty at Queen’s University, said she “100 per cent” believes temporary foreign workers should be allowed to apply for citizenship and that the immigration system should be changed to allow more lower-skilled applicants.
“You’re not necessarily accepting everybody but it is saying to temporary foreign workers you are here because we need your skills and labour,” she said, pointing to the example of live-in caregivers, who can apply for permanent residency.
Aiken’s colleague, Naomi Alboim, the chair of the School of Policy Studies Policy Forum at Queen’s, disagrees.
Alboim said the temporary foreign worker program should be cancelled immediately because there are already workers in Canada who are unemployed or underemployed who can fill the need for low-skilled jobs.
She said new immigrants — people who came through the family class category or who arrived as refugees — are willing to work and are finding it difficult to find a job.
“They would be quite happy to work in a Tim Hortons as an entry to the labour market to be able to support their family,” she said. Bringing in low-skilled workers as economic-class immigrants isn’t the solution, she added.
Alboim said that while Canada accepts about 250,000 new permanent residents a year, it accepts more than 300,000 temporary foreign workers a year who fill jobs that are often not temporary.
Why not accept more permanent residents and accept less temporary workers? she asks.
“Or why don’t we bring in more refugees? We’ll be contributing significantly to the humanitarian component of our immigration system, we will be contributing to the world and we will get people who can fill a lot of these low-skilled jobs and can become long-lasting loyal employees rather than a revolving door of employees that employers have to train,” she said.
Tim Hortons’ senior manager of public affairs Alexandra Cygal said their restaurants have been hiring temporary foreign workers since 2005. Most of the hires have been in places where there is a shortage of labour, she said, such as Alberta.
“Our owners turn to the temporary foreign worker program after they have exhausted all other avenues to fill job vacancies locally. (They) prefer to hire locally rather than go to the expense and administrative needs of hiring temporary foreign workers, but without this employment program, many Tim Hortons restaurants would not be able to operate full time or, in many cases, remain open at all,” Cygal said.
Tim Hortons prices, Cygal said, are set by the head office, which means if franchisees want to pay employees more to attract Canadian workers, they would have to absorb the cost in their profit margins.
No Labour Shortage … If You Pay Enough
Simon Fraser University business professor Nicolas Schmitt believes there is no low-skilled labour shortage in Canada, but rather that employers are unwilling to pay wages that will attract unemployed Canadians.
Schmitt said he’s not certain temporary foreign workers need easier access to the immigration system because the program already serves as a “back-door” towards permanent residency.
“A real temporary foreign worker is like (someone) in agriculture — you come, you pick the fruit, you go back,” he said. “Now, you can stay (for multiple years) or (be) sponsored by provinces to become permanent as is the case in Alberta and elsewhere,” he said, referring to the Provincial Nominee Program — a program that allows each province to set different rules to attract desired immigrants.
“The immigration policies are (a) mess. It is no longer clear cut with (the merit) points (system). There are all kinds of backdoors which I don’t find very smart to do,” he added.
Tiana Gabriel, a spokesperson for the department of Citizenship and Immigration, told HuffPost the federal government is building a “fast and flexible economic immigration system whose primary focus is on meeting Canada’s labour market needs.”
Low-skilled workers represent less than half of all TFWs, she wrote in an email.
The Conservatives recently introduced changes to the Federal Skilled Workers program to make it easier for skilled tradespersons — actual welders rather than managers — to apply for permanent residency, she wrote. “These changes are intended to keep up with national labour market needs and meet projected shortages in skilled occupations over the long term.”
Gabriel said the Provincial Nominee Program also allows some provinces to choose certain temporary workers for permanent status if the province believes they fulfil their “immigration needs.”
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ senior economist Armine Yalnizyan acknowledged the Provincial Nominee Program is used as fast-track route for some temporary foreign workers, but she said it hasn’t kept pace with the TFW Program’s explosive growth.
When the Conservative government came to office, there were 160,780 temporary foreign workers accepted into Canada. By 2011, that number had ballooned to 300, 211.
“If somebody is good enough to come here and do the job for four years, surely to heaven they are good enough to stay here if they want to — whatever that job is and whatever the pay is,” Yalnizyan said.
“Even in the 1800s, when we brought in Chinese workers to build the railway, they weren’t brought in temporarily, they were brought in as landed immigrants,” she added.
Without more avenues for permanent status, Yalnizyan warned Canada faces an increase in undocumented workers.
“If you are here for four years, the chances are — especially if you are young — that there is a possibility that you will have a child at the end of four years, and what person would not prefer to raise their child in a relatively peaceful place with good quality health care and education?
“People go underground, we know that.”]]>Stephen Harper To Skip Commonwealth Meeting In Sri Lanka, Citing Human Rights Abusestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-02T19:20:49-04:002013-05-03T07:56:34-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/
The decision may ostracize Harper as the only G8-level leader not attending the meeting with Britain, Australia and New Zealand all expected to send their prime ministers, but it is expected to be very popular with Tamils, a new community the Tories are going after.
The Conservative government has yet to decide whether it will send a minister, the high commissioner or any staff to the biennial meeting — a decision that will highlight how loudly the Government of Canada wants to make a point.
During Question Period this week, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said “no one is standing up stronger against the regime in Colombo, Sri Lanka, than this prime minister and this government.”
“If the top guy stays away but someone more junior goes, that conveys a strong but not as complete message as would be conveyed by staying away completely,” said Alex Neve, the secretary general of Amnesty International Canada.
“Our position is unless we see significant and substantial signs of human rights improvements in Sri Lanka, the meeting simply shouldn’t be happening there."
It’s highly problematic for an institution which purports to support human rights to hold a meeting in a country with deteriorating human rights, he said. The host country of the CHOGM also becomes the chair of the Commonwealth for the next two years -- which means the consequences of holding the meeting in Sri Lanka will be much deeper than photos ups and two days of meetings, Neve added.
On Thursday, Amnesty International called on the Sri Lankan government to release or charge Azad Sally, the leader of the opposition Muslim Tamil National Alliance, with an “international recognizable criminal offence” after he was taken into custody that morning by intelligence services for unknown reasons. The group also released a scathing report this week urging Commonwealth leaders to stay away from the Sri Lankan meeting.
Conservative senator Hugh Segal, who travelled to the region in March, said he had found nothing during his fact-finding trip that would make Harper change his mind.
“What I saw when I was in Sri Lanka underlined the extent to which core commonwealth values like independence of the judiciary, like democracy and human rights, like religious tolerance remain under serious attack in that country,” he said.
The abuses are rampant: Tamils are being displaced from their homes, a Tamil newspaper’s office was raided and set on fire, a mosque was burnt while local police watch over, the head of the judiciary was impeached in January.
“It’s kind of a soft ethnic cleansing,” Segal told HuffPost.
What the Prime Minister’s decision means is that Canada doesn’t have “double standards,” he said. Canada was a founding member of the Commonwealth and a country that stood steadfast, under different prime ministers, against apartheid, Segal said. “If there are values that needed to be defended in the South of Africa, there are values that need to be defended in the middle of the Indian Ocean in Sri Lanka."
Australia, however, which is grappling with boatloads of Sri Lankan refugees leaving for its coast and is working with the Colombo government, said it believes a “boycott would be counterproductive.”
“The concerns we've got about human rights in Sri Lanka are best met through engagement with that country and through the Commonwealth, using the extra leverage we will enjoy in the count down to that CHOGM meeting,” Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr said on ABC last week. A boycott, he said, would “simply isolate the country and render it defiant of international opinion.”
Harper’s decision to boycott the meeting plays favourably with Canada’s large Tamil diaspora — a community of about 300,000 people overwhelmingly located in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) where the Tories hope to pick up more seats during the next federal election in 2015.
David Carment, a professor of international affairs and a fellow at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, said Harper’s decision to boycott the event is an effort to get the Tamil community — which has historically voted Liberal — on side.
“I don’t think it has much to do with a principled foreign policy that the government claims to be advancing here,” Carment said. “This is pretty much pandering to a domestic audience.”
The Harper government “basically ignored” Tamil protesters when they took to the streets in 2009 to plead with Ottawa to address open, gross and systematic abuses of human rights, Carment said. But now, the Tories have changed course.
“The only way this government can grow is by catering to new Canadians... New Canadians are the battleground for votes and this plays into that,” he told HuffPost.
In addition, Carment said Canada holds little sway in Sri Lanka. The foreign aid budget is barely over $20 million and the country has turned to China for most of its resource needs.
The Canadian Tamil Congress has been calling on Commonwealth leaders to change the venue location for November’s CHOGM.
Spokesman David Poopalapillai said all political parties, Conservative, Liberal and NDP were on side with the Congress’ position.
“The country (Sri Lanka) is being ruled with a military mentality. How do you give the government a stamp of approval from the international community? Everything you do is right so we will come and we will shake hands with you?” he asked.
Sri Lanka has been criticized enough, he added.
“That is what the Government of Canada says. They have taken a very clear position on this,” Poopalapillai said. “They didn’t come to this position overnight. They waited and waited and waited and waited. They gave enough chances!"
Since Ottawa’s reversal, Poopalapillai said Baird has become the “darling” of the Tamil community.
Baird’s spokesman Rick Roth said government had spoken out loudly and clearly on the issue of human rights in Sri Lanka, including the lack of accountability on allegations of war crimes and a lack of reconciliation with the Tamil community.
“As the Prime Minister has stated very clearly, we expect our concerns to be addressed prior to the next Commonwealth meeting. However, given the current circumstances, it would be very difficult for this government to fully participate,” Roth said.
A source said Ottawa had tried to make its case with other countries but had been met with deaf ears.
In a statement Thursday, Sri Lanka High Commissioner Chitranganee Wagiswara blamed “separatist elements within the diaspora” in Canada for relentlessly disseminating anti-Sri Lanka propaganda and lobbying political leaders. Wagiswara said it was outrageous for some Commonwealth members to try to change the venue of the CHOGM after it had been decided by world leaders in 2009 and reaffirmed at their last meeting in 2011.
"The need of the hour from the Commonwealth is to assist and support Sri Lanka, as a Member State having experienced separatist terrorism for nearly three decades, and is expectedly now facing long term post conflict challenges to ensure sustainable peace,” she said in a statement.
“Hostile criticism and unfair targeting of Sri Lanka by Canada only serves to further strengthen the evil forces working against Sri Lanka and does not contribute in any manner to the ongoing rebuilding and reconciliation process in the multi cultural society of the country,” she added.
Sumith Dassanyake, a councillor with the Sri Lankan High Commission in Ottawa, said Sri Lanka expects all the countries to attend the November meeting. “We are making the arrangements,” he said. “We wanted to host it because...we wanted to invite these world leaders and have this conference in Sri Lanka..for the first time.”
Segal said he believes Commonwealth countries face an important decision about the type of organization they want to build.
“I think the Commonwealth values that are being violated are serious and I think the The failure of the Commonwealth so far to act, in a meaningful way, is a violation of the new Commonwealth Charter, which her Majesty signed in London not three weeks ago,” he said.
“It is certainly a violation of the core Commonwealth values that have been the reason for this organization has been together for over sixty years.”]]>Temporary Foreign Worker Program Could Lead To Europe-Style Ethnic And Economic 'Ghettos': Criticstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-05-01T13:39:26-04:002013-05-01T15:00:45-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Program don’t go far enough, say critics who fear the recent explosion in the program’s use will have deep and far-reaching consequences for Canada’s economy and social cohesion.
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney announced new rules for the TFW Program on Monday, in an effort to quell a backlash against it spurred by news that Royal Bank of Canada outsourced 45 information technology jobs to a company whose Indian workers were reportedly brought temporarily to Canada under the TFW program.
But critics say the reforms do nothing to protect vulnerable workers, and the program’s continued expansion threatens Canada’s social cohesion as a whole.
Foreign Worker Explosion Driving Down Canadian Wages
Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan said he’s happy the Harper government “blinked” in the face of public outrage, but the program will continue to flood the Canadian labour market with low-wage workers and discourage employers from training Canadians.
Alberta is ground zero, McGowan said. Some 85,000 temporary foreign workers call the province home and the results, he said, are all too visible.
“Average wages in the service sector have barely budged for the past 15 years, even as employers squawked about labour shortages,” he said. “We are convinced the only reason the wages haven’t gone up on average in the service sector is (that) the Harper government has given low-wage employers access to a never-ceasing pool of exploitable workers.”
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Only 50 per cent of employers in the construction industry offer apprenticeships for youth entering the job market or older employees seeking new training, McGowan added, even though companies keep complaining they don’t have enough skilled workers.
Last week, Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney told MPs over-reliance on temporary foreign workers distorts natural wage adjustments that lead to better-paying jobs and undermines productivity by eliminating incentives for companies to invest in technology.
Herbert Grubel, a conservative economist and former Reform party MP, said the temporary foreign worker program is a business subsidy.
“Instead of giving them (companies) cash or lower taxes, we give them access to cheap labour,” Grubel told HuffPost in a phone interview.
He said employers with labour needs who can’t find people at current wages have alternatives. They can train workers, pay higher wages and attract Canadians from other parts of the country or, like in Japan, invest in automated dispensers and machinery.
If the TFW Program isn’t scrapped, McGowan said he fears Canada’s labour market will start to resemble a number of European Union countries such as Germany and France, where “guest worker” programs are common.
“Whole sectors of the economy have essentially become low-wage ghettos where vulnerable workers are trapped, not just for a few years but sometimes for generations. That is not the Canadian way.”
The TFW Program was never intended to be a source of cheap labour for low-skilled jobs, Athabasca University academic coordinator Jason Foster told The Huffington Post Canada this week.
When it was struck in the 1970s, it was a way to get highly skilled labour into the country quickly for a short period. Actors and musicians used it, as did scientists and guest lecturers at Canadian universities. As the program expanded, first under the Liberals in 2002 and more widely under the Conservatives, it became a way for businesses to get access to low-skilled workers for jobs that employers said nobody wanted.
From 2006 to 2012, the program has more than doubled in size, from 140,000 to some 338,000 workers.
“That is at the core of the problems we now have today,” Foster said. The government took a program that was designed to be small and focused on a group of workers who could defend themselves — people with high levels of education and high levels of labour market negotiation power — and rapidly expanded to more vulnerable workers, including mid- to low-skilled occupations such as building trades and retail and hospitality workers, he said.
“Basically, anything goes now.”
Kenney acknowledged Monday that the TFW Program had expanded in ways the government had not envisaged.
“We’ve been concerned about examples of the program not being used as intended. Canadians must always have the first crack at available jobs in our economy,” he said during a press conference.
“The program was never intended to displace Canadians,” added Kellie Leitch, the parliamentary secretary to Human Resources and Skills Development (HRSDC) Minister Diane Finley.
Leitch announced employers would now have to pay temporary foreign workers what the government determines is the prevailing wage for a given job.
The Tories changed the rules last year to allow employers to pay five to 15 per cent less than the prevailing wage, if they employed Canadians at that lower rate.
Many politicians, reporters, employers and workers misunderstood the change to mean foreign workers could be paid less than what employers paid Canadians — something HRSDC insists was always a breach of the rules.
Leitch also announced the government would immediately scrap a program that allowed accelerated acceptance of TFW visa applications.
Kenney told reporters the government now wants to make it more expensive for employers to look abroad for labour.
The business community responded quickly. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce said the changes were disastrous and would penalize small and medium-sized businesses, especially in Alberta where more than 40 per cent of all temporary foreign workers were placed in 2012.
Dan Kelly, the president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said small and medium-sized employers would not be able to afford the yet-to-be-announced user fees. They already spent $5,000 to $6,000 in recruiting fees, plane tickets, and other expenses to bring in temporary workers, he told HuffPost.
“You are not going to do that unless you are absolutely desperate,” Kelly said.
University of Alberta professor Alison Taylor and her colleagues interviewed more than 20 temporary foreign workers in the construction and nursing fields. Taylor said most if not all reported paying huge fees to local and Canadian recruiters, an illegal practice. In some cases, individuals took out large loans at exorbitant interest rates to get into Canada, she said.
Several workers said they received threats from their employer.
“He (the employer) said, ‘Can you stay late tonight?’ … I said, ‘How long it takes?’ ‘Maybe until tomorrow.’ I said, ‘No, I can’t.’ He’s so very angry he’s yelling at me again. ‘You know what, tomorrow I will call immigration and ask them to bring (you) home,” Taylor recounts one conversation with a worker in the construction field.
Employees under the TFW program cannot change employers because they are dependent on those who brought them here. “They are a very vulnerable population,” Taylor said.
“What you are doing is creating a second-class of worker,” she added.
Foster, who worked with Taylor on several research projects, said if the program continues unchanged, Canada will create European-style ghettos of migrant workers.
“What flows out of that are growing … tensions, class tensions and racial tensions because you have basically have two classes of residents,” he said.
“You create a large group of people who receive none or only partial access to the rights and privileges of citizenship. They end up doing the sort of low-status work. They are lower paid, it’s harder work, it’s uglier work. (They are non-citizens who) serve the full citizens. Over time, what starts to develop is this sense of animosity, this sense of resentment that they are doing all this hard work and they are not being included in society,” Foster said.
At the core, it’s a sense of inequality and a sense of division between different groups in society, he said.
For now, that problem doesn’t concern employers but it should concern the government, Foster said.
“(Employers) get cheaper, more compliant labour. They solve their short term labour problems and the long term costs are borne by others.”
Does Canada even need foreign workers? Foster is unwilling to say no.
“That’s the more complicated question,” he said when asked. “I can guarantee you, we do not have a labour shortage of gas station clerks and hotel housekeepers. What we have is a shortage of people prepared to do those jobs with the current wages and working conditions that they are provided for those jobs.”
Kelly vehemently disagrees. In remote towns, there are no young people to do the work, he said. In resource and mining towns, the profit margins of employers in the service sector mean they can’t afford to compete with big businesses to attract Canadian employees.
Think of a small community in Northern Saskatchewan: if the young people they are able to attract to that community are making $80,000 or $90,000 a year in the oil and gas sector, what does a restaurant do? What does the grocery store do? Kelly asked.
“They can’t match an $80- or $90,000-a-year paycheque and so they get zero applicants. The unemployed auto worker in Windsor is not moving to Estevan, Sask., to work at a pizza place. They are just not!”
Why not raise the price of the pizza slice to afford the laid-off auto worker from Ontario? People in Iqaluit are certainly used to paying much more for a Subway sandwich than people in Toronto.
“People are not going to pay $30 for a sandwich at the local restaurant,” Kelly responded.
Nicolas Schmitt, a business professor at Simon Fraser University, said the temporary foreign worker program has deepened unemployment in certain parts of the country.
“When you have huge demand for construction in B.C. and (a) high unemployment rate in Newfoundland, you would expect the market to adjust through salaries … people from Newfoundland would come to B.C. because there are higher wages to attract them in B.C.,” Schmitt told HuffPost.
But temporary foreign workers slow down those adjustments, he said. Workers in Newfoundland stay in Newfoundland because there is no incentive for them to move. In the long term this means higher unemployment and more imbalances across the country in terms of employment rates, Schmitt said.
Gordon Betcherman, a social sciences professor at the University of Ottawa, said he believes Canada needs the flexibility of a migrant foreign labour force but he is concerned the federal government blindly trusts employers’ claims they’ve searched for Canadian workers before they hire from abroad.
“These programs should be based on the principles that employers can justify that they have done an exhaustive job search, that they simply cannot find Canadians who can fill the jobs and that, at the same time, they have a long-term plan to correct the problem. … Clearly, in many cases it wasn’t implemented that way,” he said. “The labour market opinions were given without due diligence and the people granting the authorizations were presumably bending to the requesters of employers.”
Betcherman said nothing in Kenney and Leitch’s announcement Monday fixes that problem. The federal government doesn’t have the information required to allow public servants who administer the program to assess the credibility of the claims.
“This program can be very useful (if we have) a much better information base than we have and much better ways of using that information base to distinguish between fair claims and not fair claims,” he said.
“I just wonder how true the claims are that Canadian workers don’t want to do the job if they are given a fair wage? It may be true. I just don’t know.”
What is the solution? Part II in our series on temporary foreign worker looks at whether the temporary program should be scrapped and larger immigration reforms contemplated.]]>Canada Privacy Breaches: More Than A Million Canadians May Have Had Data Compromisedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//2013-04-23T19:30:52-04:002013-04-23T20:02:29-04:00Althia Rajhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/althia-raj/
Prompted by a question from NDP MP Charlie Angus, the government was forced to acknowledge this week that at the very least, there were 1,072,999 instances where a Canadian’s private information held by various departments and agencies was lost, stolen or accessed by an unauthorized third party.
In a stack of documents tabled in the House of Commons Monday, the government admitted it has recorded more than 3,134 data and privacy breaches between 2002 and 2012 across all departments — although many departments only counted data breaches within the last two to five years. Of the total breaches, only 399 were reported to Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart.
“You have a million people whose privacy has been breached under this government’s watch,” Charlie Angus told HuffPost Tuesday. “It looks like the Privacy Commissioner has been kept in the dark through most of it — and the government doesn’t seem to know how many people have been affected. That is the concerning part of it.”
According to federal legislation, the government is not obliged to tell Canadians if their personal information has been breached. Departments are also not required to inform the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.
It appears the federal government may have tried to lowball the number of Canadians affected. Public Works only reported that 501 individuals were affected by breaches at the department. The total number of individuals actually affected, when one counts each case individually, was 348,061. Public Works failed to count a case where it inadvertently forwarded a file containing the unencrypted social insurance numbers of 332,560 individuals to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). The department also didn't count a case involving 15,000 people whose names, dates of birth and unscrambled social insurance numbers were handed over on a CD to a subcontractor who should not have had access to the data.
A cyber-attack at the department of finance in 2011 was not reported to the Privacy Commissioner. A Finance official said the department would not comment on the specific incident but could confirm that no breaches of personal information had occurred.
Most departments said they didn’t inform Stoddart’s office because the disclosure of financial, medical or important personal information wasn't involved.
Angus, however, doesn’t buy that excuse.
“I don’t think that’s acceptable. We’ve seen international cyber hackers have tried to get access into federal departments. We don’t know where this information went (or) who took it,” he said, pointing to a 2011 incident in which hackers, believed to be from China, accessed Treasury Board computers belonging to senior government officials in an attempt to steal passwords and unlock entire government data systems.
“If that was happening at the Treasury Board, how are we to believe that the Treasury Board President [Tony Clement] actually has a handle on it and is in control?” Angus said.
The Conservative government said Tuesday that it takes the privacy of Canadians seriously.
"Our Government is continuously taking measures to safeguard personal information," Clement said in a press release.
Although several departments acknowledged they have no way of knowing for sure what happened to the data after it was breached, the federal government said it’s only aware of two cases where breaches led to criminal activity: A 2005 incident involving a finance department official named Serge Nadeau, who was charged with breach of trust after using insider knowledge to profit on the stock market; and a 2007-2008 incident at the Public Service Commission of Canada that was not reported to the Privacy Commissioner. (The Public Service Commission told HuffPost Canada on Tuesday it had erroneously reported that the illegal copying of a Public Service Commission test led to criminal activity.)
Recently, the federal government has come under fire for two large-scale privacy breaches involving the department of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSCD). The Privacy Commissioner is currently investigating the disappearance of an external hard drive that contained the personal and financial information of some 583,000 Canadians who had applied for the Canada Student Loans Program, as well as 250 HRSDC employees. It is also investigating the loss of a USB key containing the personal information of more than 5,000 Canadians.
Bob Buckingham, a lawyer from St. John’s, has launched a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit against the federal government over the HRSDC privacy breaches. He said he hopes the scope of his class action lawsuit will spur the government into action.
“They are just not taking the possible consequences of this seriously,” he told HuffPost in a phone interview.
“I don’t think it’s sunk in yet, that the state has so much power to collect so much data on so many Canadians (and) that there has to be an equal amount of time, effort, energy and policy put into protecting information,” he said.
Several of the privacy breaches outlined in the documents reviewed by HuffPost involve the loss or misplacement of information. Statistics Canada, for example, reported that in 2006-2007, employment records of 66 employees had been left in a filing cabinet that was then sold. The agency also reported sending several letters to the wrong person or businesses and it noted a few thefts: an encrypted laptop was stolen in 2007-2008 and a postal box that contained questionnaires of 31 people was stolen in 2008-09. Police found the documents when they busted an identity theft ring, but Statistics Canada said the information did not lead to any criminal activity as far as it was concerned.
Correctional Service of Canada reported 894 privacy breaches since 2004, and 205 breaches in the past year. It said the increase was, in part, due to staff becoming more aware of “their duty to manage information property and to report on data, information or privacy breaches as soon as possible.”
“In earlier years, breaches were not reported on as systematically as they are now,” Correctional Service of Canada said.
Veterans Affairs reported 373 breaches involving 999 individuals. When asked for an explanation spokesman Simon Forsyth said the Privacy Act prevented him from discussing individual cases even in generalities.
It is likely there are several hundreds — if not thousands — of additional data and privacy breaches. The Canada Revenue Agency said it couldn’t identity all the data, information and privacy breaches that had occurred since 2002 because the department would have to do a manual search of all its records, a task not feasible within the 45 day deadline set for answering Angus’ question.
National Defence said it would not respond to Angus’ question relating to breaches of classified information and data for “security reasons.” Neither would bodies such as the Communications Security Establishment Canada and Military Police Complaints Commission.
National Defence did note that in 2011-2012, the disclosure of someone’s job performance information was improperly sent to the media and that in 2012-2013, medical records of one Canadian Armed Forces member were given to another Canadian Armed Forces member who presumably should not have had access to it.
Charlie Angus said the NDP has been pushing for clear rules so that if a privacy breach happens, the Privacy Commissioner is informed immediately. “Given the danger of cyber fraud and identity theft, the Privacy Commissioner needs to know,” he said.
Jennifer Stoddart noted in her annual report for 2011-2012 that the number of privacy breaches reported to her office last year had reached 80 — the highest number in recent years and a 25 per cent increase from 2010-2011.
She noted that Canadians were often in the dark when a federal department or agency had lost or disclosed their data without their authorization to a third party. She said that since disclosures to her office were voluntary, she couldn’t determine whether the increase reflected more diligent reporting or an actual increase in breaches.]]>