New Liberal ads ask: What is Stephen Harper hiding?

The Liberal Party of Canada, hopeful that it can parlay dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to prorogue Parliament last month into weakened voter support for the Conservatives, released a series of new radio and print ads this morning.

The print ad is to the left.

You can check them out at the Liberal Web site. They're pretty simple.  One says proroguing was Harper's Christmas gift to himself to avoid having to answer questions about allegations of Afghan detainee torture, climate change and job loss. No politicians, Liberal or otherwise, are featured in the ads.

Meanwhile, a new poll is out this morning that, despite the prorogation issue, voter support does not appear to be shifting a great deal (except, perhaps in Quebec). Angus Reid, in a poll done for La Presse, finds that 36 per cent of committed voters would cast a ballot for the Conservatives, compared to 29 per cent for the Liberals and 17 per cent for the NDP. In Quebec, the Bloc Quebecois has the support of 36 per cent, the Liberals have 26 per cent, the Conservatives have 19 per cent and the NDP has 11 per cent. La Presse does not provide information about the poll's methodology or its accuracy and the poll does not yet seem to be posted at Angus Reid's site.

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Part II: Asking Harper about proroguing: In New Brunswick, journos used just one of six questions on it

The prorogation is a hot topic in political circles, no doubt about it.

An EKOS poll out this week suggests the Tories have lost some voter support because of prorogation. A Facebook group set up to demonstrate against the prorogation now has more than 100,000 members. And, when I and my colleague John Ivison made a calculated decision not to ask the Prime Minister about prorogation in a 13 minute and 39 second interview less than 24 hours after CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge grilled the PM about the same topic, the blogosphere enthusiastically punted me around the block for my failure to bring up prorogation (please read the interview: we talked about senate appointments, climate change, Afghanistan, election speculation, the budget and Harper's future in our 13 minutes). Heck, even my dad chimed in on my Facebook page that I ought to have asked about the prorogation.

Tonight, though, after reading all that criticism, I am slightly heartened by reading the transcript of the Prime Minister facing several reporters in New Brunswick Friday afternoon who, as it turned out, did exactly what I and John did and chose to ask, by and large, about something other than prorogation.

The questions came from CBC, Radio-Canada, The Globe and Mail, the Saint John Telegraph-Journal and others. Here they are, in the order they were asked:

  1. Will Canada allow LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) tankers through Head Harbour Passage and Passamaquoddy Bay?
  2. There's a vacant position in the senate for New Brunswick. I'm wondering if you intend to appoint someone to the senate and if it's possible to have a name today?
  3. Prime minister – a question with respect to the meeting in Saint John a little later on. You stated in Montreal yesterday that nothing had changed in the federal government's action plan and why, therefore, have a pre-budgetary consultation when economists have stated that the recession is just about over?
  4. Mr. Harper, in response to today's numbers showing jobs are down, mr. Ignatieff has said there's a jobs crisis in canada. That's why he's holding hearings on the matter starting this month. Is there a jobs crisis? And are you missing an opportunity to deal with this because the House is prorogued?
  5. I'd like to know how you respond to growing public opinion against your decision to prorogue Parliament.
  6. On the LNG Issue, will the government consider passing a regulation to simply ban tankers from Head Harbour Passage?

So Harper got one question among six which was definitely about prorogation. It came from a CTV reporter. That's notable because while print outlets could all use and quote the Mansbridge interview where Harper talked about proroguing, CTV, as a competing network cannot use that footage of Harper and Mansbridge and, as a result, does not have Harper on tape talking about proroguing while their competitors do. CTV, then, is asking this question because it's the last major news organization to be able to report on Harper's views on proroguing. (My organization did so immediately after the Mansbridge interview.)

Here's Harper's answer to the CTV question, number 5 above (my emphasis):

Harper: It's interesting to see a week after we set the date for Parliament to return that the Opposition now says they're going to be really mad about this when they get back from vacation on January the 25th. The fact of the matter is this… Is, as i've said before, the government is going to take advantage of this time, we need the time to look carefully at our agenda, to continue to deliver the economic measures that are being delivered here and elsewhere across the country as part of the economic action plan. We also need time to re-examine our agenda, to prepare for the next year in parliament, and prepare for a very different economy going forward, one that, on the one hand i think we're going to start to see a recovery. We've seen stabilization in the last few months. We're going to see a recovery. We need to get our policies in place to better build that recovery and to build the jobs of the future, but, at the same time, to do so in an environment where governments across this country will have to begin to reduce our deficits. We've run very large deficits to cope with the extraordinary situation we've found ourselves in the past year. I think those policies have been fairly effective. I think they need to continue for a while, but we do need to think about exit strategies so that we obviously move back towards balance but continue to build the jobs of the future in this country.

The only new bit here is that he chides opposition leaders a bit.

This was the first chance, incidentally, a representative of The Globe and Mail has had to ask the prime minister about prorogation, a topic which alarmed that paper enough that it ran an editorial on the front page of its newspaper, a rare and noteworthy step (“Democracy Diminished, Accountability Avoided“, Dec. 31, 2009, A1). And yet, with its first chance to ask the PM about that decision, its reporter chose to ask a question about a tepid employment report for December. That's a perfectly defensible choice – and it's pretty clear that the Globe's editors in Toronto wanted that question put to Harper for what I'll bet is their line (lead) story Saturday — but there is at least one Globe reporter who believes journalists should be concentrating our questions on prorogation or torture. CBC, Radio-Canada, Canwest and others apparently disagree. (Though we'd all agree it's still a very important topic: I can't stress that enough, I fear).

All of which is to say: Neither Canwest News Service, National Post, The Globe and Mail, or any other news organizations thinks the decision to prorogue is not newsworthy. It is. (And Canwest for one, and I'm sure others, will be writing about it soon and often) And we would very much like to ask the PM more questions about it but, if you read what he said to Mansbridge, what he said to Ivison and me and, what he said to CTV in New Brunswick, you'll see that he's going to say pretty much the same thing — “as I've said before“.

I keep writing about this incidentally because I take this responsibility — asking questions of the powerful knowing I'm a proxy for my readers and the less powerful — very seriously. I very much want to ask the right question whether I'm asking Harper, Michael Ignatieff, Jack Layton or anyone else. I want the answer to that question to provide some new insight or some new thinking about an issue. Sadly, given the constraints journalists have to work with when it comes to questioning this or any prime minister, it's my judgement that we're just not going to get new insights or new thinking by asking Harper about prorogation — and we're all better off asking Harper about something else — and continue to ask others about prorogation.

Vote for John!

John Gushue and I have been online acquaintances since they measured bandwidth in baud and he hopes readers of this blog can help him win the coveted Newfoundland and Labrador Bloggers' Choice Award. There's no cash prize if he does win; no trip to Florida; not even a bloody shot of rum. Just a nice button he can hang on his page. And, of course, for you, there's his undying gratitude.

So clickthrough on this link and put an X beside his name — he's number six on the ballot (down there on the right hand side) and, as you'll find out when you vote, one of the leaders of this crazy race! And you'll probably want to bookmark his blog while you're at it!

Good luck to all!

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Interviewing Harper: What to ask? Why not ask about prorogation?

Yesterday, National Post columnist John Ivison and I interviewed Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Like most, but not all, news organizations in Ottawa both the Post and Canwest News Service have standing requests in with the PM's commmunications staff for interviews with the prime minister. Over the Christmas break, he did 'year-end' interviews with CTV and TVA but (so far as I know) no one else.

This week, the lucky numbers popped up for us, CBC, and La Presse.

So what to ask? Well, before you can get to that, you need to know how much time you're getting to interview him.

The amount of time we get to ask questions is always one of the biggest haggling points with PMO handlers. CTV for the last few years makes a big production deal out of the year-end PM interview and reserves a full half-hour on its programmming schedule to broadcast it. As a result, CTV — over the last few years anyhow — has generally gotten the biggest chunk of PM's time — 30-40 minutes.

This week, Peter Mansbridge, anchor of CBC's The National, got 18 minutes. That's a lot of material for television but, when Evan Solomon asked Mansbridge for a preview about his "wide-ranging" interview, Mansbridge joked: "I love how you call it wide-ranging. It's 15 minutes. How wide-ranging can it be?"

So what did we get? Well, I turned my tape recorder as I sat down next to the PM in his Langevin Block office and when I turned it off at the end of the interview, while standing in his office's anteroom, a total of 13 minutes and 39 seconds had elapsed on the digital counter.

That's not a lot of time — and John and I knew going in, we'd be lucky to get 15 minutes — but it is enough time if you're smart about your questions. So the question we and our editors had before the interview, then, was what questions to ask?

We are there, incidentally, as proxies for our readers, not as proxies for the opposition parties or for a particular interest group. That's important to remember because the goal for Canwest, at least, is to leave the interview with a story that the local editors of the Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen and other Canwest papers would find interesting enough that they would make (valuable) space for in their papers. It's important to note that even though we are all part of the same company, the decisions about what goes in each paper is very much made by editors at each paper and they make those decisions based on their knowledge of their own local reader communit.

So before we sit down to hash out the questions we have two things in mind: We're not getting much time and we need something that local editors believe will strike a chord with their readers.

So, first, we had to think about any news events that had popped up that day. When Mansbridge did his, the news had just emerged that airports in Canada would be installing full-body scanners and he, quite appropriately, began his interview with that subject.

No such news-of-the-day item had cropped up as we sketched out our questions but we also felt that since we and other news organizations had extensively reported that day on the Mansbridge interview, we ought to, as John put it in his column this morning,"push on to ground less well tilled".

Had we done the interview in the same news cycle as Mansbrige, the issue of proroguing Parliament would almost certainly have been near the top of our list of things to ask. But we were coming a day later and Mansbridge had, it seemed to use, done a reasonably good job or probing Harper on that issue:

PETER MANSBRIDGE: Let’s move on to the other issue that has come up in the last week, and that was the decision to prorogue Parliament. You know that it’s received a lot of attention, a lot of discussion. When you made the call to the Governor General last week and she gave you the approval for that idea of proroguing, what did you say to her as the main argument for suspending…?

RT. HON. STEPHEN HARPER: Well, first of all, as you know, a decision to prorogue when the government has the confidence of the House is a routine constitutional matter, and truth of the matter, Peter, is that sessions of Parliament since Confederation have been on average roughly a year. Look, the reason is quite simple: the government has I think notwithstanding a very difficult economy, we’ve had a reasonably successful year in Parliament in the past year, but it’s been an extraordinary year in which we were obviously trying to implement an extraordinary economic action plan, a series of stimulus measures to deal with the peculiar circumstances of 2009. We’re now looking at a very different year coming forward, a year that we’re much more optimistic about, and we want to take some time to recalibrate the government’s agenda, both on the economy and on some other matters. So we’re going to present Parliament with a series of proposals for legislation going forward when the House reconvenes.

MANSBRIDGE: But you’ve seen the reaction. I’m not just talking about the partisan reaction. There’ve been editorials, there’ve been commentaries by respected constitutional experts who say this is the kind of thing that is leading to the cynicism on the part of Canadian people about the political process, that the process is there for, you know, for parties and politicians, but not for the people. A session of Parliament could be suspended at a time when there were all kinds of things still on the books, some of which you said are extremely important to your government, and they’re off the books now.

HARPER: Well, let’s be clear. First of all, the government passed all of its important economic and financial legislation of the past session, so we did conclude all of that. We have, as you know, some important crime legislation. That legislation will continue to be difficult. It continued to be difficult through the past Parliament, both, in both Houses of Parliament, but particularly the Senate. As you know, we have some opportunity to fill some Senate vacancies and help deal with that problem. But as I say, Peter, there’s nothing particularly unusual about a session of Parliament being roughly a year in length. Governments do want to examine their agenda from time to time and refresh it, and I would simply invite the opposition parties to take the opportunity to advance their own ideas. The government is going to look comprehensively at its agenda for the new Throne Speech, and we’d certainly be delighted to hear any suggestions of a general or specific nature that they have.

MANSBRIDGE: But what do you say to those outside of the political process who look at what’s happened here, second time in a year, different circumstances in both cases, but the argument being made by many, I mean, you know, you can’t pick up a story on this issue without somebody referring to the Afghan detainee issue, saying that that’s really the reason that you and your government wanted to stop the investigative work of the committee.

HARPER: I think polls have been pretty clear, Peter, that that’s not on the top of the radar of most Canadians.

MANSBRIDGE: No, but that’s not…

HARPER: What’s on the radar, what’s on the radar is the economy, and as I say, the government is looking at a…first thing we’re going to do when we come back is have the second stage of our economic action plan, a budget, new financial measures; that’s our focus. We’re in a very different kind of economic year, and that’s what we’re adjusting to. I’m sure the opposition will…you know, they’ve been on that subject for three or four years now. I’m sure they’ll continue on it.

MANSBRIDGE: No, but is it not legitimate to wonder, you know, whether or not…just because it’s not on the radar of most Canadians, showing up in, you know, public and one assumes internal polling, that that means it’s not important?

HARPER: Well, obviously we have a big difference of opinion with the opposition as to whether that is an issue that warrants attention or not. But as I say, the decision to have a new session of Parliament after a year is not unusual. Last year circumstances were unusual. I think everybody concedes that. This year circumstances are frankly quite normal. As Prime Minister, I think my sessions of Parliament have been a year or slightly over a year, so this is fairly standard procedure. I mean, I don’t think it makes sense for a session of Parliament to go on and on without the government periodically re-examining its overall agenda.

MANSBRIDGE: Do you think the decision to prorogue should be left in the hands of the government of the day, or should it be a decision that perhaps Parliament should have a vote on?

HARPER: No, I think it’s ultimately should be in the hands of the government of the day because it’s ultimately about the government presenting its agenda to Parliament, and the government calibrating its own agenda. When Parliament prorogues, for example, private members’ legislation is not broken off. It continues. So the opposition’s work will continue as soon as we come back.

Every news bureau in Ottawa received this transcript and each generated at least one news story out of it, a news story that appeared in the papers on Wednesday, the same day we were doing the interview. My Canwest colleague Andrew Mayeda, in fact, played up the 'prorogue' section of the interview: Prorogue 'routine', Harper says: Government will "recalibrate agenda

Other organizations emphasized other issues Mansbridge brought up in the interview:

So I, John, and our editors found ourselves wondering if we should bring up the prorogue issue at all in our 13 minutes, knowing that, if we did so, other important topics would have to be left out given the time constraints. Among our considerations:

  • If we filed a story on Harper's views on proroguing, local editors responsible for deciding what goes in Thursday's papers would likely not be much interested because they had just put a story in the paper on Wednesday with Harper's views on proroguing. It may matter a great deal to those inside the bubble on Parliament Hill who asked the question but it doesn't to our readers. And that would have been the only new part to the file, the fact that we, rather than CBC, had asked the questions.
  • Was there a serious angle that Mansbridge missed or didn't have time to pursue with regards to proroguing? We didn't think so. Mansbridge had asked five questions on the topic. That's plenty. In our meetings, I said that a smaller issue Peter might have pursued was that while some could take as reasonable the desire to 'recalibrate" the agenda or re-set Senate committeees by proroguging,  I had yet to hear a reasonable explanation as to why the prorogation period had to last until March. Why not just prorogue on Jan. 25 and call Parliament back on Jan. 27, as planned, for the throne speech? Doing that would still have allowed for the reasonable objective of re-setting committees and recalibrating agendas without seriously interrupting Parliament's ongoing business. But while I'm still interested in getting some answers to that question, that seemed a question about tactics and was not the kind of forward-looking question that would generate a news story that would interest most readers.
  • Was Harper likely to say something to us on proroguing that he didn't say to Mansbridge? In our judgement, no. Harper would have said much the same thing to us and probably used the same phrases. Indeed, when I asked him in our interview about the economy, he repeated much of the same material he did to Mansbridge. And in fact, he used phrases and lines I've heard him use for the past four months in speeches in Canada or abroad in China, India, South Korea, and Singapore. The PM, like most politicians, is prepared with talking points on a variety of issues and (perhaps unlike some politicians) the PM rarely strays from those well-considered phrases particularly when it comes to a contentious issue like proroguing.

So for all those reasons, we put the topic of prorogation off to the side, believing that we had already served our readers interested in this issue well be reporting on Harper's first comments on prorogation and we would continue to serve our readers well by getting Harper to speak about other issues we know are important to Canadians. So we chose Afghanistan, climate change, the senate, election speculation, the economy,  the budget/deficit, and a personal question (most good interviews, in my opinion, try to draw a subject out with at least one question they likely can't have prepared for and mine was a query about what kind of career he saw for himself after politics, in a decade, say) We knew that with seven topics we'd have to move quickly to touch on all of them in our allotted 10-12 minutes.

And, at the end of the day, we think we chose relatively well. Harper's comments on the Afghanistan mission seemed the most newsworthy to us and, indeed, the story focusing on those comments is the line or lead story todayon the front pages of the National Post, Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix, the Windsor Star and is among three lead stories played by the Ottawa Citizen  . The story was 'teased' or mentioned on the front pages of the Montreal Gazette and the Regina Leader-Post.

My blog's biggest hits in December – plus what was hot here 5 years ago

More than 80,000 people dropped by this blog at least once last month — a thank you to each and every one for your attention — and viewed more than 210,000 pages. Here's a list of the posts that were viewed most often last month (with date of original posting):

  1. Excuse me for being impertinent but China has no right to be rude to our PM (Thu 03 Dec 2009 12:48 PM EST)
  2. Chinese premier rebukes Harper: Transcript and audio (Thu 03 Dec 2009 08:15 AM EST)
  3. Huh? "We cannot allow the pen to be mightier than the sword" (Fri 18 Dec 2009 12:12 AM EST)
  4. Harper's holiday to-do list? Appoint senators, prorogue Parliament, throne speech, budget, Olympics (Wed 16 Dec 2009 12:52 AM EST)
  5. Full text: China-Canada Joint Statement (Thu 03 Dec 2009 06:14 AM EST)
  6. Chinooks and Globemasters: Boeing wins nearly $4 billion from Ottawa (Fri 11 Aug 2006 09:38 PM EDT)
  7. More anecdotal evidence of Conservative pork barrelling (Wed 16 Dec 2009 02:36 PM EST)
  8. The 4th Quarter Economic Update at 40,000 feet over Siberia (Wed 02 Dec 2009 09:23 AM EST)
  9. "Liberty is the better way": Some thoughts on Canada, China and human rights (Tue 01 Dec 2009 04:33 PM EST)
  10. The cost (tono you and I) of saying goodbye in politics: Nearly $7 million (Mon 14 Dec 2009 06:10 PM EST)
  11. PMO communications now doing its own audio and video releases (Wed 02 Dec 2009 07:39 PM EST)
  12. Wheat Board politics: Ritz vs Goodale (Mon 09 Jun 2008 12:50 PM EDT)
  13. Stephen Harper goes shopping for tea in Shanghai (Sat 05 Dec 2009 08:54 AM EST)
  14. Afghan detainees and the release of sensitive documents (Thu 10 Dec 2009 09:37 AM EST)
  15. Senate appointments and proroguing: Some background (Wed 16 Dec 2009 12:12 PM EST)
  16. Ignatieff: "I’m going to be looking at the unemployment numbers first and deficit second." (Fri 18 Dec 2009 06:12 PM EST)
  17. $10 million to renovate 24 Sussex? My buddy'll do it for a casino license … (Mon 21 Dec 2009 11:29 AM EST)
  18. Kick Canada out of the Commonwealth for climate change inaction, greenies urge (Thu 26 Nov 2009 03:29 PM EST)
  19. Pork barrel politics on Salt Spring Island? (Tue 15 Dec 2009 03:54 PM EST)
  20. F-35 – Test Flight (Wed 10 Jan 2007 03:07 PM EST)

And now, just for fun, here's the same list from five years ago, for December, 2004. Five years ago, this blog drew about 36,000 unique visitors for the month and served up 57,000 page views.  I draw your attention to number two, the five-year anniversary of iTunes in Canada!:

  1. Air Canada and a new Celine Dion video — right here! (Mon 01 Nov 2004 10:33 PM EST)
  2. (Finally!) Apple launches iTunes in Canada (Thu 02 Dec 2004 09:16 AM EST)
  3. CIBC attacks scrapyard operator; Finance Minister launches investigation (Tue 30 Nov 2004 11:08 AM EST)
  4. New paint for Air Canada's planes (Mon 01 Nov 2004 10:55 PM EST)
  5. A place to sleep in the sky (Mon 01 Nov 2004 10:58 PM EST)
  6. Finally!! Airport Extreme and my LinkSys router are talking! (Sat 13 Dec 2003 08:26 AM EST)
  7. International Donut Wars: Tim Horton's vs Krispy Kreme (Fri 17 Dec 2004 12:15 PM EST)
  8. Ontario commits major privacy gaffe (Sat 04 Dec 2004 08:40 AM EST)
  9. Wade Peer (Tue 07 Dec 2004 04:23 PM EST)
  10. More on FOX News comes to Canada (Thu 18 Nov 2004 03:29 PM EST)
  11. Who pays for this blog? Some disclaimers (Fri 13 Aug 2004 08:09 AM EDT)
  12. Sabia on BCE (Wed 15 Dec 2004 08:38 AM EST)
  13. Yet more errant CIBC faxes, plus TD Bank and Scotia also implicated in privacy breach (Fri 10 Dec 2004 10:44 AM EST)
  14. [What they said] Apple calculator a bad joke (Tue 10 Aug 2004 07:44 AM EDT)
  15. Inside Reagan National in Washington (Tue 07 Dec 2004 04:11 PM EST)
  16. The Canadian Gate at Washington Reagan (Tue 07 Dec 2004 04:08 PM EST)
  17. No blogging from Olympic village (?) (Sun 08 Aug 2004 08:55 PM EDT)
  18. CIBC bans faxes; privacy commissioner investigates; more leaks (Mon 29 Nov 2004 04:57 PM EST)
  19. CIBC CEO updates fax apology (Fri 17 Dec 2004 11:26 AM EST)
  20. Fitch picks up Toronto's Algorithmics for $175 Million (Fri 17 Dec 2004 11:20 AM EST)

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Though he could stack Senate for majority power, Harper will stick at five

This afternoon, National Post's John Ivison and I interviewed Prime Minister Stephen Harper in his Langevin Block office on Parliament Hill. The first story out of that interview is online – PM cools election speculation; says budget will address deficit – and we'll have a second up later this evening and in tomorrow's newspapers focusing on his comments on the future for Canada's mission in Afghanistan. A full transcript of the interview should also be online later tonight.

In the meantime, here's our chit-chat about the Senate appointments. There are five vacancies right now in the Senate and Harper is expected to fill those shortly. When he does that, the Conservatives will have a plurality of Senate seats — 51 to the Liberals 49 — but with six Senators representing other parties or sitting as independents that often vote with the Liberals, Harper won't have a majority.

We asked him if he he will appoint more than five Senators, as he is allowed to do under the Constitution, in order to get that majority and eliminate any obstacles to Senate reform and other legislation in the Red Chamber. Here's that part of the exchange:

IVISON: Prime Minister, it seems there is not going to much for us to write about, unless there are Senate appointments in our near future. Are they coming, will there be more than five and will that have a big impact on your Senate reform plans?

HARPER: As you know, the government intends to fill the new vacancies in the Senate. I don’t think we’ve been secret about that, especially after the Liberals used their numbers in the Senate to block three important pieces of government legislation that were widely supported by the public – cracking down on grow-ops, dealing with the problem of auto-theft and also some consumer product safety legislation, which, I will say as an aside, you wrote a very good column on, so you do think once in a while! But this is important legislation and we quite frankly find it appalling that it was blocked. So we will be naming the five vacancies in the not too distant future. That will help – it will make us the largest party in the Senate but it doesn’t solve all of our problems because we still don’t have a majority. But it will make passage of these bills easier.

It will also give me some senators who will support the government’s Senate reform agenda, which is one of the many things stalled. If there’s any legislation that gets the most difficult ride of all in the Senate it’s Senate reform legislation. I’m optimistic that as we appoint more reform-minded senators, we’ll start to unblock the Senate.

AKIN: Just a quick note on John’s question, you’re going to appoint five and not more? You could appoint more.

HARPER: I have no plans to appoint..as you know the Constitution will allow an extra four or eight. That’s been used once. It would be an extraordinary act, so I would hope we would never get pushed to do that.

Harper interview excerpt: Worried U.S. taking "a gun registry approach" to border control

Yesterday afternoon, CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge interviewed Prime Minister Stephen Harper. A transcript prepared by the PMO was distributed to some Parliamentary Press Gallery members. Here's an excerpt in which Harper talks about the full body scanners to be installed at Canadian airports, news that made the front page of just about every newspapers in the country.

Peter Mansbridge:  Let me start with what was announced today, the new security measures at airports, because it seems to me that the question becomes what does this say about nine years after the war on terror began that increased security at airports is needed to prevent another threat. What does that say about the times we live in right now?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper: Well, I’m not sure when you sit back it really says anything that surprising, Peter. I don’t think any of us thought these threats would go away, and the threats seem to be mutating somewhat, and authorities, obviously beginning with authorities in the United States and whatever happens there, as you know, and security has tremendous effects on our air travel, that we have to keep adapting. It’s my hope that as we adapt, we find smart and, you know, relatively efficient ways to adapt, but that’s what we’re going to have to keep doing. Obviously the incident around Christmas, you know, brought in a whole new series of dimensions that governments are going to have to adjust to.

Mansbridge: It’s interesting, that Christmas threat, because the Americans have basically admitted that was their problem. That was their issue, their mistake, and this person getting through their screening process, and yet it’s affecting everyone. We’re basically having to change our rules because of a mistake they made.

Harper: Well, I guess what I would say is we face common threats. I wouldn’t want to say that what happened there could not happen here, and obviously if they’re going to undertake steps to address that kind of threat in the future, we’re going to look at those threats and examine whether we should take similar measures. We don’t have to take identical measures, but we certainly have to undertake measures that would prevent any similar kind of threat in Canada, and you know, I mean the first priority – I know these cause tremendous inconveniences for everybody, but the first priority ultimately has to be the safety and security of the Canadian air traveller and of our airport facilities, and we know that unfortunately these things are at risk in this day and age.

Mansbridge: The scanner issue is one that was studied for 18 months. The Privacy Commissioner ruled on it. But there are other things that have been happening over these past couple of weeks since the Christmas issue, and I’m wondering how you figure on that balance between, you know, security and the rights of an individual. We’ve seen, you know, a list of countries being made, questions being raised about racial profiling. Does any of this worry you, that…?

Harper:: Well, these are all things that factor into our considerations. We have privacy laws in Canada. We have court decisions. As you know, our courts have tended to be less deferential to governments on security matters than courts in the United States. This is something the government has to factor into any security measures it undertakes, and obviously there are issues of treating people fairly, of treating people equally, of balancing privacy concerns with the ultimate goal that we must protect and we must make sure the travelling public is safe.

Mansbridge: Did you think any of those are being crossed right now?

Harper: Well, we haven’t done, in fairness, Peter, we haven’t done a thorough examination of exactly what measures the US has undertaken and how we’re going to apply them to Canada. We’re going to look at those one at a time, and we may arrive at some different judgements or we may not, but all of those things will be factored into our decision-making.

Mansbridge: When you see a list of countries, some of which we, you know, have normal relations with, does that bother you?

Harper: Well, I go back. I don’t think it’s about diplomatic relations. You know, we have the same thing with the visa problem. It’s not about diplomatic relations. These are often about other considerations. It ultimately in this case has to be about the possibility of a security threat and dealing with that. But as I say, we’re going to take a look at these measures very carefully, and we may arrive at different conclusions. The one concern I do have about all of this is I…and I’ve expressed this to American leaders. I see what I call the gun registry approach to a lot of security issues, which is let’s just put everybody on a list, register everything, and we know from our own experience with our gun registry that this is not necessarily the smartest and most effective way to actually identify real threats. And so it’s my hope as we look at these things, which you know, invariably will cause some changes in mass procedure, that we make sure that we respond in ways that are intelligent, ways that effectively identify threats before they happen as opposed to simply massive bureaucratic sets of rules or procedures, which I think in and of themselves are of limited value.

Mansbridge: Have you suggested that to President Obama?

Harper: I can’t remember. I know I certainly had that conversation with President Bush. I can’t recall whether I’ve had it with President Obama, but I’ve had it with a series of American officials.

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The worst political move of 2009? How about Harper's environmental no-show?

On CTV's Question Period this afternoon, a journalist panel was asked what they thought was the “worst political move” of 2009. CTV's Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife makes what I think is a convincing argument that the worst political move last year was the Harper government's inability to craft a national environmental/climate change plan. The leaders of the country's three biggest provinces — Ontario, B.C. and Quebec — are now heading their own way when it comes to environmental policy and their way is likely at odds with some of the choices that energy-rich provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan might favour.

That sets the stage for more regional factionalism in the country and another potential unity crisis, argues Fife. I think he's on to something.

Here's what Fife said on QP this afternoon (transcript provided by CTV):

… what I think is the worst political move, and it's not one that has really been on the radar screen that much, has been the failure of this government develop a national environmental plan that involves all the provinces and all the industries. We're now seeing that the provinces are leading the way on environmental … and you're now seeing Ontario and Quebec pitted against Alberta. And I think the failure of the Harper government to deal seriously with environmental policy is going to potentially fracture the unity of this country.

What you cannot have are the central Canada, the two biggest provinces where so much of the industrial base is fighting with the engine of the economy right now, which is Alberta, and its oil. But we are seeing those divisions, and they're very serious divisions, and if this is not addressed we may be back in the kind of unity crises that we saw back in the 1990's…

Conservatives who want a break on lobbying rules can remain anonymous

On Oct. 27, I attended a meeting of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. The country's Comissioner of Lobbying Karen Shepherd was the main witness at that meeting. Shepherd is the first to hold that job. She was appointed in June to oversee new rules for lobbyists, rules that were one of the key promises of the Conservatives when they campaigned in 2006.

One of the interesting tidbits to come up at that meeting was the issue of exemptions. As you may know, the new law prohibits any public office holder — a broad group of folks that includes anyone from cabinet ministers to deputy ministers to the political staffer who carries the minister's briefcase — from being a registered lobbyist for five years after leaving their public office. You can get around that prohibition by applying to the Commissioner of Lobbying for an exemption. Ten people have asked Shepherd for exemptions and two were granted. Two others withdrew their names. Politicians at the committee asked for the names of the others who did not get exemptions. Shepherd said she would not say and advised MPs to use Access to Information laws to get those names.

The next day, I filed an Access to Information request to get those names and on Dec. 31, I received the official notification from that, no, I will not be able to receive those names and so, unless those individuals want to step forward and identify themselves, we will never know which Conservatives wanted an exemption to lobby their old friends.

The Commissioner's office, incidentally, is required by law to respond to my request within 30 days of my request and did not do so – a violation of federal law for which there is no sanction, one of several failings of our access to information laws. In fact, the Commissioner's office did not reply until I telephoned them to inquire about the status of my ATI request.

In any event, here are excerpts from that committee meeting of Oct. 27 on the exemption issue, followed by my ATI request and, following that, the response from Shepherd's office to my information request.

First the excerpts on exemptions, beginning with a question from Liberal MP Michelle Simson:

Michelle Simson (Scarborough Southwest, Lib.): … I want to zero in on the tail end of your opening remarks where you touched on the fact that the Lobbying Act introduced the five-year prohibition period for former designated public office-holders. You have the authority to grant the exemptions. Could you expand on the internal review process you implemented and the specific criteria you have in place to either approve or decline an exemption request?

Karen Shepherd: In terms of the process, we have a description on our website of the type of information we would like to see. When an application comes in for review, we will look at their past employment, résumés, whether they happen to know any information on their future employer, and so on. Interviews will be conducted with witnesses, and maybe past employers, or the applicants themselves if there's a new employer. Once all of that is done and analyzed, the report is given to me for consideration.   

Part of the process we introduced was to give the applicant 30 days to comment on my intent. In other words, if I'm going to be granting the exemption or not, they get 30 days to respond. If I grant the exemption, or an exemption with some conditions, they are given a letter with an exemption number that they then have to use for registration. If the exemption is granted, the act indicates that I must, without undue delay, post my reasons for that exemption on the website.

To answer your second question on criteria, the act provides some criteria, for example, if the person has been in an acting position for a short period of time–maybe student employment, administrative duties only–whether the employer would gain an unfair advantage. In the case of transition team members, there are a few others that are added.

The position I have taken is that Parliament put the five-year prohibition in the act for a reason, which was to stop the revolving door. To me, the rule is that the five-year prohibition holds, and it is only with exceptional circumstances that I will grant an exemption.

Simson: Your report stated that you received seven applications in 2008 and 2009. Two were granted, and you have to post that information to the website. Is there any access for the public for the other five that maybe were declined, or is that kept private?

Shepherd: I have actually received ten applications to date. Two applications dealt with individuals who had left prior to the act coming into force, so even though they were comprehensive applications, there was no authority for me to grant an exemption. Two individuals withdrew. I denied three applications. And there is one current application.

With respect to those who are subject to the five-year prohibition, if they are not granted an exemption that is posted on my website, then they are subject to the five years.

Simson: Is the information on the ones you decline publicly accessible?

Shepherd: The department is subject to the Access to Information Act and Privacy Act.

Simson: So the public could access that information.

Shepherd: They could put in a request and we would go through the process of analyzing it. Because they are public office-holders, I would assume that some of the information would be permissible to give out. However, according to the Privacy Act, if the information is of a personal nature or there is confidentiality from a third party, I couldn't give it.

Pat Martin (Winnipeg Centre, NDP): Good morning, Ms. Shepherd. I'm surprised to see in your report that you report a reduction in corporate lobbyists and even staff lobbyists. It's been my experience that you can't swing a cat on Parliament Hill without hitting a lobbyist. It feels like an infestation sometimes, especially in the members' gym, where a lot of the highest paid lobbyists in the land are in fact former cabinet ministers who skulk around the members' gym and look for secret meetings, etc.

I'm very surprised to see you see that. I don't see it as a bad thing–a reduction in lobbyists–as you might be able to tell. I liken it to driving the money-lenders from the temple even, if you ask me.

I'm very surprised, though, to see you say that the ink is not even dry on the new act and you're already granting exemptions. Who have you granted exemptions to, to date?

Shepherd: Mr. Chair, would the member like me to address the first point, in terms of the reduction of the number of lobbyists or…?

Martin: I'd rather not. We don't really have time for that. (Ed note: At committee meetings, NDP MPs, generally get only 7 minutes in the first 90 minutes or so for their questions and answers. So Martin here knows he only has 7 minutes to get Shepherd to answer his questions.)

The Chair: Take him off the list.

Martin: I just want to know who you have granted exemptions to, specifically the names of the people you've granted exemptions to.

Shepherd: They're on the website: one is Mr. Mark Brosens, who was in the minister's office, and Monsieur Guy Bujold, who had been the former president of the Space Agency.

Martin: I'm not even going to ask you for the rationale, as I don't think any reasonable rationale would exist. Why you would, after all the work we went to, to put a Lobbyists Registration Act, a toughened registration act, in place…. And on the Federal Accountability Act, as I say, the ink is hardly dry.

I think we should remind ourselves as a committee how important this act is. The difference between lobbying and influence peddling is about five years in prison. And it's a fine, fine line. Lobbying in an incorrect way, lobbying in the way that we were trying to address under the Federal Accountability Act, bastardizes democracy, undermines democracy in a very substantial way. So you have one of the most important jobs on Parliament Hill.

I don't mean to be critical, but we didn't put in place a robust Lobbyists Registration Act so it could be ignored within months of it being finally implemented. We had frustrations with the former act. I turned in Don Cherry for lobbying on the Hill, I believe, illegally, and we are very frustrated that even after a lengthy investigation, they found nothing wrong with Don Cherry bringing his jar of COLD-fX into the Prime Minister's Office and the very next day having COLD-fX deregulated under the Canada Health Act as a medication.

There have been glaring problems with lobbying.

Well, I suppose my question would be this. Does it not concern you that somebody like these two individuals can peddle the information they used to have privileged access to, to advantage a private sector corporation or organization?

Shepherd: Mr. Member, to answer the question, what I said to the other member, I meant it. In terms of granting exemptions it's very much that. There will be exceptional circumstances.

I very much respect what Parliament passed in terms of wanting to avoid the revolving door and to ensure that those who were in certain positions could not use their contacts or other benefits for lobbying purposes for five years. So when in reviewing those requests that I did grant—and I still denied more than I've actually granted—the review and analysis done by the team that presented me with the report was extremely thorough to ensure that the individuals in question could not use the contacts that they use for benefit.

The Chair (Paul Szabo, LPC): I may also add that it's not the commissioner who decided whether she would make exemptions. The act empowered the commissioner to do that. The committee that came forward with the act must have thought there would be some circumstances under which it would be appropriate.

Martin: We should have slammed that loophole shut while we had the chance.

The Chair: That's true, and maybe we can still do it. We could do it with another private member's bill.

Martin: I guess this committee is particularly sensitive to the issue. We're the oversight committee for it. But we've also just gone through this exercise with Karlheinz Schreiber. The lobbying in the old days, with sacks of dough, exceeds it. Nobody ever said back then that what Karlheinz Schreiber was doing was illegal lobbying. That was just the culture of Ottawa at the time. People with vested interests sought the favour of people in power who had the ability to do what they wanted. I don't know if that's really changed today, except that we have no evidence of sacks of money changing hands in secret meetings in hotel rooms. But everything else is pretty much exactly the same, except for the five-year cooling-off period.

We're also faced with a problem. A lot of people bolted when the getting was good and got in just under the wire. We know that in the Conservative ranks a memo went out. It said that if you want to lobby, you'd better get out now, because the law is going to change pretty soon. There was an exodus, a rush, of people who established themselves before the rules. Is there any satisfaction available to the Canadian taxpayer regarding that flurry of new lobbyists who set up shop just before you and the act had the ability to deal with them? They got away with it.

Here is the wording of the request I filed the next day under the Access to Information Act:

Please provide: The names of the public office holders who have applied for exemptions under the Lobbying Act since its coming into force on July 2, 2008 and who were denied an exemption. Please provide the names of these individuals and public office or offices held.

And here is the response to my request, e-mailed to me by Pierre Ricard-Desjardins, the Access to Information co-ordinator in Shepherd's office, after I had telephoned on Dec. 18 to inquire about the status of my request.

Good day Mr. Akin,

This relates to your Access to Information request dated October 28, 2009, which was received by our Office on December 21, 2009, concerning:

“The names of the public office holders who have applied for exemptions under the Lobbying Act since its coming into force on July 2, 2008 and who were denied an exemption. Please provide the names of these individuals and public office or offices held.”

As I mentionned to you over the phone on December 18, 2009, the above request is considered a request for the disclosure of “personal information” pursuant to Section 3 – Definitions, of the Privacy Act (the Act).

In particular, the Act states that “personal information” means information about an identifiable individual that is recorded in any form including, without restricting the generality of the foregoing,

   (f) correspondence sent to a government institution by the individual that is implicitly or explicitly of a private or confidential nature, and replies to such correspondence that would reveal the contents of the original correspondence,

Therefore, the application of an individual for an exemption to the 5-year ban on lobbying to the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying (OCL) (a government institution), by a public office holder would fall under subsection (f) of the definition of personal information.

Under Section 10.11, paragraph (4) of the Lobbying Act, it states that if such an exemption is granted, the Commissioner shall without delay cause every exemption and the Commissioner's reasons for it to be made available to the public. Thus, the Commissioner is immediately obligated to publish this information on the OCL's Web site and the Lobbying Act authorizes the disclosure of this particular personal information.

However, under the Lobbying Act, the Commissioner is not allowed or obligated to disclose any personal information other than in paragraph 4 referred to above and is in fact prohibited from doing so under Section 8.(1) Disclosure of personal information of the Privacy Act, which states the following: “Personal information under the control of a government institution shall not, without the consent of the individual to whom it relates, be disclosed by the institution except in accordance with this section.”

Paragraph (m), which would permit disclosure without consent of the third parties, states the following:

For any purpose where, in the opinion of the institution,

   (i) the public interest in disclosure clearly outweighs any invasion of privacy that could result from the disclosure, or

   (ii) disclosure would clearly benefit the individual to whom the information relates.

In our opinion, neither of these criteria would apply with regard to this particular personal information.

Thus, we must consult with the individuals themselves, and seek their permission to divulge their personal information as you have requested above. Should you wish to proceed with your request, our Office will then to ask the relevant third parties, in writing, if they are willing to allow the disclosure of their personal information.

Please notify our Office as soon as possible should you wish to proceed with your request. Also, please keep in mind that our Office will only be able to release the information you seek with the express written consent of each of the third parties involved. In this context, our response may be delayed somewhat, but is likely to be provided within the allowable 30 day extension period.

I look forward to your answer.

Season's greetings.

Pierre Ricard-Desjardins,

ATIP Coordinator

MySQL creator says Oracle is a threat to the "free Internet"

You may have no idea what MySQL and that's o.k. but, if you're a heavy Internet user, you're probably surfing through a lot of Web sites that are powered by MySQL, a relational database program that is a very handy, helpful bit of free, open-source code. Now, the stewards behind MySQL believe that MySQL is under threat from Oracle, the world's second biggest software company. Oracle is buying Sun Microsystems and Sun 'owns' some of intellectual property used to create MySQL and Oracle, which makes its living selling closed-source, proprietary database programs, is perceived as less than interested in seeing MySQL prosper. Oracle has responded to these concerns. You may want to take a quick minute to review the following — it landed in my inbox today — and click through on the links for more information.

Of course, I welcome your comments on this as to the perceived threat by Oracle to MySQL:

Hi!

I am contacting you because you have in the past shown interest in MySQL and from that I assume you are interested in the future well-being of MySQL.

Now you have a unique opportunity to make a difference. By signing the petition at http://www.helpmysql.org you can help affect the future of MySQL as an Open Source database.

You can find more information of this on my latest blog post at: http://monty-says.blogspot.com/2009/12/help-keep-internet-free.html

Help us spread the world about this petition! http://www.helpmysql.org is available in 18 languages and every vote is important, independent of from where in the world it comes! If you know people that are using MySQL, please contact them and ensure they also sign the petition!

Regards,
Monty
Creator of MySQL