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Just got the notice in my inbox this morning about a project — freshly launched — called Visible Government. This non-partisan group is trying to build online tools it hopes will improve the ability of Canadians to learn about and monitor the activities of the federal government.

It has three projects on the go — and it hopes to add many more — one of which is working towards creating some kind of standardized database for the disclosure of the expenses of politicians and their political staff. Right now, each department publishes how much each Minister, for example, spent to travel, eat, and sleep while doing the government's business. That's great but the data is published in an HTML table and only contains information about that one minister. If you wanted to compare that minister's spending with others, you've got to extract data from several HTML tables and that's a chore. And what if, for example, you wanted to compare Joe Volpe's spending on pizza dinners when he was Human Resources Minister with current Human Resources Minister Monte Solberg's penchant for pizza dinners? You can do it, but you are in for a long day of manually extracting information from lots and lots of HTML tables.

Some of us on the Hill have grumbled about trying to convince the government to take the next step with proactive disclosure (as this initiative is called) and publish the data in a way that is more useful to the public.

The Visible Government project, which may be modelled on the excellent OpenSecrets approach that tracks U.S. federal government disclosure info, looks to just that.

Visible Government is also working on a forum for tracking and discussing bills before Parliament, following the example of the U.S. site, OpenCongress. That's another great idea although the Library of Parliament does a relatively decent job of publishing information about bills at its LEGISinfo site and will even deliver an RSS feed about a bill you're interested in. Of course, the parliamentary Web site doesn't provide an online forum for discussion about bills nor does it do much in the way of tagging bills for search services like Technorati and so on.

Ken Dryden, you might have heard, once played a little hockey. I'm told that James Moore laced up the skates, too, and racked up a lot of penalty minutes playing junior hockey on the West Coast.
Dryden and Moore are now Members of Parliament and this week, during Question Period in the House of Commons, the veteran Dryden tried to knock down the younger Moore but Moore came into the corner with elbows up and … ok … enough with this extended metaphor: just play the clip. (3 min Quicktime video)

If William Corbett, the Commissioner of Elections, concludes somewhere down the line that his investigation into what is being called the “in-and-out scheme” did, in fact, involve violations of the Canada Elections Act, Corbett will hand over the file to the newly minted Public Prosecutor of Canada, Brian Saunders. [Saunders' office has not yet updated the bio at its Web site. It still refers to him as Acting Public Prosecutor but, in fact, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson made his appointment permanent on Feb. 18 this year.]

Creating the office of the public prosecutor was an idea that Stephen Harper promised in Quebec City in the morning of the second day of the 2006 general election. I remember this day well as I was travelling with him at the time and it was probably the single worst day for the Tories on what would be a very long campaign. (Overall, I thought the Conservatives ran an intelligent, effective, and highly disciplined campaign but it sure didn't look like that was going to be the outcome during those first few days.)

To begin with, Harper announced this public prosecutor idea in Quebec City surrounded by local candidates (some of them now MPs) whose names he could not remember. Those candidates would include a future Foreign Affairs Minister named Maxime Bernier. Then — and this was as out-of-character for Harper then as it is now — he had trouble clearly explaining just what it was that a public prosecutor would do. To finish the morning off on a high note, candidate (and now Heritage Minister) Josée Verner actually shoved CBC reporter Julie Van Dusen out of the way in order to flee from the scrum which ensued after Harper had left the room.

But the day didn't end there. We left Quebec City and, over lunch, flew to Halifax where Harper was to address a big rally there in the late afternoon. Then Premier John Hamm was on hand as well as other notable Nova Scotia Conservatives including one Peter MacKay. Now Harper's professional training is as an economist. MacKay, on the other hand, is a lawyer and served for a time as a Crown prosecutor in New Glasgow. So MacKay has some good first-hand knowledge about the kinds of decisions a public prosecutor might make. But it turned out that MacKay — he was Harper's deputy leader remember — had not been briefed about this key election promise. In fact, the reporters on the bus at the time learned that Conservative strategists had not even solicited MacKay's advice about the office — an odd omission, not only because MacKay was a former prosecutor but also because Nova Scotia was the only province to have a Public Prosecution Service. In fact, Nova Scotia has had one since 1990.

So, naturally, we asked MacKay about the idea of a public prosecutor and he told us he'd only heard about that morning.
Then, we repeated the lines Harper had made earlier that day about a Public Prosecutor, namely:
“The independent director of public prosecutions, not a politician, will decide on prosecutions arising from the sponsorship scandal. We will let him do his job without political interference, while we get on with the job of governing.”

To which MacKay said:
“Let me be clear: A federal prosecutor has no jurisdiction over criminal offences, which include the Criminal Code.”
Apparently, they've since sorted this thing out and, while I'm no lawyer, my reading of the “About page” at the Public Prosecutors site seems to suggest MacKay was right — at least for most of Canada. The Public Prosecutor does have Criminal Code jurisdiction but only in the Territories and certainly not in Québec were some Liberal organizers and ad agency types and civil servants did, in fact, face Criminal Code sanctions for their role in the Sponsorship Scandal.

If you've been watching the Conservatives over the last couple of days respond to the RCMP raids on their headquarters, you might think the raid was connected to the civil suit the Tories filed against Elections Canada last April. I get the sense the Conservatives want you to think that but you would be wrong.

I can tell you for a fact that the search warrant was executed on behalf of the Elections Commissioner and has nothing to do with the Conservatives suit against the Chief Electoral Officer. My source for this: Individuals involved in the lawsuit who do not wish to be named for fear of being seen to be arguing their case in the press but are happy to provide a little background on that lawsuit's process. I've reported this fact on day one of the RCMP raids and on day two.

The Elections Commissioner — his name is William Corbett and he is acting quite independently from the Chief Electoral Officer, Marc Mayrand — has a three-day warrant which expires today. So the RCMP could be back at Conservative HQ again today but sources have told my colleagues at Canwest News Service that the RCMP and the Elections Commissioner got everything they needed yesterday.

Meanwhile, you've got one commentator suggesting the raid is “revenge” for years of attacks on Elections Canada by Harper. One mainstream media outlet even led with their coverage by repeating that assertion. I'm not so convinced because both Corbett and his boss Mayrand were appointed on Harper's watch (a fact both the commentator and that other paper did not mention). Seems to me that even if you accept the odd assertion that bureaucrats have nothing better to do than 'get back' at politicians for calling them names, those individuals haven't had a key to the door at Elections Canada in a long time.

The RCMP, you may have heard, raided the national headquarters of the Conservative Party of Canada today to execute a search warrant on behalf of Canada's Elections Commissioner. Commissioner William Corbett is investigating allegations that the Conservatives broke 2006 general election advertising spending limits.
“Political parties have rules and they are set by a body that is non-partisan and we should all play by them. And when we’re offside, we should get slapped down for it. And today was a slapdown,” Liberal MP Garth Turner said outside the House of Commons today.
Turner campaigned and won his southern Ontario riding of Halton in the 2006 general election as a Conservative. He was then suspended from the Conservative caucus for violating caucus confidentiality and subsequently joined the Liberals. “The Conservatives in the last campaign were full of little tricks and schemes and ways that candidates and campaigns would have money flowing through them,” Turner said.

We've been reporting this today and here's the official notice from Canada's most popular general. General Rick Hillier will be speaking to reporters at National Defence headquarters at 5:30 pm today Ottawa time:

Message from the Chief of the Defence Staff to the Canadian Forces
NR–08.026 – April 15, 2008
OTTAWA – I have chosen to retire from the Canadian Forces and end my tenure as your Chief of the Defence Staff in July of this year.
I accepted the leadership of the Canadian Forces in February 2005. My goal was to set the conditions for our sailors, soldiers, airmen and airwomen to succeed in our critical and often dangerous tasks in defence of Canada, Canadians, and Canadian interests and values.
We have achieved those key objectives, and reached the critical milestones I originally set out for us to reach by the end of my time as CDS. We have moulded our culture to one which recognizes that operations are our raison d’être; that our efforts, all of them, must concentrate on achieving the missions and tasks given to us by the Government of Canada, on behalf of all Canadians.
We have transformed how we recruit, train, equip, command, deploy, employ, bring home, recognize and care for our operational forces and our families, focused on achieving a strategic effect for Canada. We have done so while growing the Canadian Forces, re-equipping it, and while carrying out intense combat and peace support operations overseas and demanding, essential security tasks here at home.
We have remembered how to grieve; to never forget our comrades and dear friends who have died in the service of Canada. Their sacrifice, and that of their families, deserves our unwavering commitment to ensure their loss is not in vain.
We have been strengthened, immensely, by the vocal and visible support of millions of Canadians who have demonstrated that they recognize, understand and honour your service, and the sacrifice of your families.
Leadership in the Canadian Forces is not the role of one single person; it is the responsibility of all who wear the Canadian Forces uniform. I believe you will now be best served by the invigoration of new leadership, with the vision, energy, and strength to lead you through the challenges that will lie ahead. For we have not finished evolving. We must continue to adapt, and improve our Forces to accomplish the tasks Canadians need us to perform in the complex, dangerous security environment before us.
It is with great confidence that I await the selection of the senior leader who will take my place. I will continue to serve as your CDS until relieved of my duties by my successor, to be named in due course by our Prime Minister.
My wife Joyce and I thank you for the rewarding years we have shared with you, and look forward to many years ahead as part of the Canadian Forces family.
You are Canada’s greatest credentials, our national treasures, and I am so very proud of you. It has been my honour and privilege to be your Chief of the Defence Staff.

Brian Mulroney (right), in his Memoirs, talks about relations with the press. This excerpt comes from an entry he made into his personal journal on Feb. 24, 1990. Funny how this sounds so, erm, contemporary:

I had not returned to their “press theatre” since January 1987 — over three years. For a while, the gallery thought I would return on bended knee and sent me summary resolutions reminding me of my obligation to “openness” and “respect for freedom of the press,” all of which I discarded. After a year, they began to sound more reasonable and after another year, during which we wond another commanding majority, the actually sounded somewhat contrite. What eventually got to them, however, was their realization that they had deprived themselves of regular exposure to the head of government, thereby doing a substantial disservice to their readers/viewes and serious damage to their own reputations, because of their progressively limited access to real decision makers in town.

I had always accept the notion of an adversarial relationship with the media. Indeed, while I found it personally disagreeable, I even tolerated a period of great personal hostility and quite evident unfairness and bias without any response, believing somewhat naively that eventually they would find their professional moorings and rediscover the basic tenets of journalism that they had so demonstrably abandoned. Where I drew the line, however, was the deep disrespect and malice showed by some gallery members, without the slightest repudiation by its executive members — indeed when silence and qualified grins suggested nothing less than complicity and approval. So I withdrew from the offensive farce they staged and refused to attend a press conference, in the certain knowledge that whatever obligation I had to meet regularly with the press did not extend to condoning juvenile delinquency by its members. Moreover, I knew that whatever contempt they had for me was completely irrelevant, if the Canadian people granted me their confidence, which they did in impressive and historic fashion on Nov. 21, 1988. Somehow that night in Baie-Comeau, the unrelenting attacks by the media over the previous four years were dealt with by the voters as I watched another strong majority government being formed under my leadership. The Canadian people were telling me and many others that they had paid little attention to the members of the Ottawa gallery.

From Brian Mulroney, Memoirs, Toronto: McLelland and Stewart, 2007 (p. 728)

Technorati Tags: Conservativees, journalism, prime minister, Brian Mulroney

Pollster Nik Nanos is out with his latest look at voter intentions — headline: Grits and Tories tied — but one of the interesting things he says is that some soft NDP voters may have moved over to the Liberals because of the Lukiwski comments.

Conservative MP Tom Lukiwski was caught on tape 17 years ago making a vicious anti-gay remark — a remark he immediately apologized for as soon as the tape came to light. Nanos says his poll was in the field as this came to light. In the poll, NDP support has dropped by five points. In Ontario, support for the Liberals climbed and NDP support dropped.

“It's quite possible that some soft Ontario New Democrats have strategically parked with the Liberals to block the Tories,” Nanos said.

Here's the big picture numbers:

• Conservatives: 36 per cent (up 5 points since the last poll in Feb. 2008)
• Liberals: 36 per cent (up 3)
• NDP: 14 per cent (down 5)
• Bloc Québecois: 8 per cent (down 2)
• Green Party: 6 per cent (down 2)

Nanos surveyed 827 Canadians by telephone between April 4 and 9. The pollster says the results are accurate for the national sample to within 3.4 percentage points 19 times out of 20.

Technorati Tags: elections

Elvis Costello is nearly 10 years my senior which means, as he was putting out what the first and (for me) strongest three records of his career — My Aim Is True (1977), This Year's Model (1978), and Armed Forces (1979) — I was just hitting my teen years and discovering the energy and excitement of punk, post-punk, and power pop. Elvis, along with the Clash and XTC were, so far as I was concerned, too smart, too cool, and too great.

Now, thanks to a tip from my friend Susan D., I've discovered an absolutely fabulous quote attributed to Elvis:

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. It's a really stupid thing to want to do.”

Makes sense to me — and I say that as someone who's in the biz I'm in because some editor way back when told me I could keep the record if I wrote a review for his paper.

The quote that Susan D. pointed me too is in a post by Andy Heidel in which he links that quote to some new books about music, one of which is the latest from Oliver Sacks.

I haven't yet read Sacks' newest — it's called Musicophilia and explores several brain dysfunctions as they relate to our ability to understand, remember, and create music — but I have had the chance to listen to a lecture he gave on it.

And there's a pretty good review essay on Sacks' latest book in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books. I only call it “pretty good” because reviewer Colin McGinn efficiently and effectively Sacks work as a clinician, neurologist and writer but misses the point when it comes to the music. What is it about music, about rhythm, harmony, pitch, and tone that moves us in, so far as Sacks is concerned, the deepest places in our brain, soul, and heart. Again: I haven't read Musicophilia so I don't know if Sacks gets past the neurons and chemistry of the brain and into the mystery of the connection our species has with music but Sacks certainly seems to get into it in his TVO lecture.

In any event, you can listen to the Sacks podcast, too, via Big Ideas, the weekly program on provincial public broadcaster TVO.

FWIW, I subscribe to the podcasts of Big Ideas using Apple's iTunes. To find the Sacks podcast, use iTunes; go to the iTunes Store and search for TVO. Then look for the “Big Ideas” icon and click on it. The Sacks podcast is from Feb. 23 of this year. It's terrific.

Now the Big Ideas series is something I check out every week although I don't find all of the ideas big or necessarily interesting.Your appetite for individual lecturers will depend on your intellectual tastes but here are my recommendations:

– Dec. 8, 2007 – Jay Melosh talks about what killed the dinosaurs

– Dec. 15, 2007 – Eric Thurman explains the theory behind the system of microcredit and makes a compelling case that microcredit, more than any other kind of aid program, has the potential to lift many parts of Africa and Asia out of poverty.

– Jan. 12, 2008 – Naomi Klein plugs her latest book and has what turns out to be a rather funny but powerful anecdote about being injuried in a car crash in post-Katrina New Orleans.

– Feb 2, 2008 – Harvard's Steven Pinker swears like a sailor — and explains what's going on in the brain when we do that and why we use the naughty words we use. This was tremendously entertaining.

– Feb 9, 2008 – Rory Stewart makes me sick with all that he's done and seen in his — what? — first 35 years. He's tutored royal princes, written books, learned to speak Urdu, Nepali, and Persian, walked — that's right, walked — 6,000 miles across Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Iran, and India He talks here about rebuilding Afghanistan.

For better or worse, it was Jean Chrétien's idea to ban corporate and union political donations and, instead, allow political parties to survive on receipts from the general taxpayer. And so, every quarter, Elections Canada hands out the allowance to those political parties that did well enough in the last election to qualify for that allowance. Each political party gets 43.75 cents a quarter (that's a $1.75 a year) for each vote it garnered in the last general election, so long as the party cleared the threshold of 2 per cent of all votes cast in the general election or — and this is a very important 'or' if you are the Bloc Québecois — 5 per cent of all votes cast in those electoral districts in which the party ran a candidate.
So, with that background, cheques are on the way from Elections Canada to the following parties for the following amounts:

• Conservative Party of Canada: $2.57-million
• Liberal Party of Canada: $2.14-million
• New Democratic Party of Canada: $1.24-million
• Bloc Québécois: $742,000
• Green Party: $317,000