Category: Politics

Earlier this week, I posted some of the results of government records I received as the result of an Access to Information request. After a September meeting in Calgary between three top cabinet ministers and more than two dozen oil and gas executives, I asked three governnment departments for the briefings, etc. produced for and after this meeting.

The title of my post was “Conservatives’ secret meeting with Calgary’s oil and gas sector”. Many of you objected to my characterization of this meeting as “secret” and some of you, judging by your comments, wondered what all the fuss was about.

The Prime Minister’s Director of Communications, Sandra Buckler, was also among those who wondered if I hadn’t veered a little too far away from the truth. Here’s a lightly edited excerpt of a message she sent me today:

We made no secret of consultations with industry.

We have and will continue to talk to industry leaders about the environment because it will take everyone's participation to make a difference.

The government has been involved in consultations with all sectors of the Canadian industrial economy since early last summer.

These consultations have been conducted by bureaucrats and by ministers.

The consultations have involved a free exchange of views on all aspects of the government’s environmental agenda.

While the consutations have not been held in public, there has been no secret about the fact they have taken place.

There have been consultations with [environment non-governmental organizations] as well.

The results of all of these meetings will inform the decisions which will ultimately be made by the government as to the regulation of both GHGs and air pollutants.

I believe your blog is misleading – the conspiracy tone doesn't match up with the truth.

I’m always pleased to hear from Sandra but, as this my house, so to speak, allow me a rebuttal:

The meeting in September was not publicized ahead of the fact by any government official. When we got wind of the meeting, I called or wrote government officials who were unable to confirm the meeting. CTV and several organizations, through a little luck and hard work, tracked down the whereabouts of the meeting. A meeting that is not publicized ahead of time is, by definition, secret.

After the fact,  none of the minsters involved would answer any basic questions about the meeting: Who was there? What did you talk about? Why did you have this meeting? So far as I know, none of the ministers have ever spoken in any detail about that meeting and, as we still do not know who the attendees were (the records I received only list the inviteees), there is much we still don’t know about this meeting. In other words, it’s secret.

The ‘records’ I received contain several sections that were blacked out, i.e., they are “secret” and I am not permitted to view them.

Now, many, including Sandra, suggest it is not unreasonable to meet with those about to affected by new federal regulations. That may be true but we’re not arguing about that point, we’re arguing about the appropriateness of labelling such meetings secret. Clearly, the meetings were secret in the sense that none of the participants indicated ahead of time that such meetings were taking place.  The mere fact that no one tried to hide their existence after the fact doesn’t make them any less secret. The participants of that meeting remain secret. We know only who was invited; not who showed up. We have no minutes of the meeting, only the talking points for one of the ministers. We do not know why the Minister of Indian Affairs attended a meeting. Clearly the subject area seemed to be suitable for the Ministers of Environment and Natural  Resources. But why was Jim Prentice’s attendance required? I can guess but, as I’m a reporter, I’d rather deal  in the facts.

I would also point out that one of the reasons Conservatives are overhauling the lobbyists registration system is to make the system more ‘transparent’ or “less secret”. One of the ways the Conservatives plan to do this is by asking lobbyists to declare who it is in government that they meet with. Would it not make sense that it should also go the other way? If cabinet ministers ask to meet with key industry players, should there not be increased transparency or ‘less secrecy’ of that process?

I look forward to your comments …

So you’ve probably heard that Prime Minister Stephen Harper doesn’t like the press very much. And you may have been told that the media hate Harper. Whether or not this is true — perception has, by and large, become reality on Parliament Hill. This chill has manifested itself most obviously as a dispute between the 300 and something members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery (PPG) — of which I am one— and the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).

The PMO has decreed that press conferences held by the Prime Minister in the Parliamentary precinct will be moderated by a member of the PMO’s staff — chiefly Deputy Press Secretary Dmitri Soudas. If you want to ask the PM a question, you must find Dimitri, have him write down your name in his little black book and then he will, at some point during the press conference, call out your name. The PPG at first chafed under this List protocol. The PPG itself had been used to moderating these press conferences. We used to seek out a PPG executive, have that PPG executive member write our name down in a little black book and then, at some point during the press conference, the executive member from the PPG would call out your name.

For the record: Every time I have put my name in Dimitri’s book, he has called out my name. And every time I have put my name on a list maintained by the PPG, my name has been called.

In any event — the PPG wanted it done one way. The PMO wanted it done their way. There was much protesting by both sides and eventually, the PMO decided to hell with the PPG: Harper wasn’t going to do press conferences here. And he didn’t. He did lots away from Ottawa with the regional media where the PMO could run press conferences the way the PMO wanted.

After months of this, PPG solidarity cracked. CTV and many other news organizations agreed to do things the PMO’s way. We were on The List! We thought we’d made our point but, at the end of the day, we thought we would best serve our viewers and readers by asking the PM some tough questions. But some organizations believed they were fighting for a more important principle, that those who are being questioned ought not to choose the questioner. And so, decisions were made by senior executives of The Canadian Press, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and CBC that their journalists in the PPG would not put their names on The List.

And so we come to today. This week, the Parliamentary Press Gallery held its annual elections for its executive and its annual meeting. For the first time since 1974, there were three candidates competing for the job of Press Gallery President. Richard Brennan of The Toronto Star, Elizabeth Thompson of the Montreal Gazette, and my colleague, Rosemary Thompson all contested the top job and the issue of PPG-PMO relations were at the centre of their campaigns. In an election held Wednesday with one of the highest turnouts ever (I’m told), Brennan, who had served as the president of the Queen’s Park Press Gallery in Ontario for eight years,  won the top job. Brennan’s executive includes:

• Hélène Buzzetti of Le Devoir, vice-president
• Angeley-Marie Bonenfant of Radio Canada, secretary
• Jim Bronskill of Canadian Press, Treasurer
• Yves Malo of TVA, Past-President

Today we elected the five directors to serve with the executive and they are:

• Jennifer Ditchburn of Canadian Press
• David Ljunggren of Reuters
• Chris Rands of CBC Radio
• Rosemary Thompson of CTV
• Hugo De Grandpré of La Presse

And then the 100 or so members who attended this meeting held a spirited discussion about the relations between the PMO and PPG. As it turns out, the chiefs from the big bureaus here got together and tried to work out a plan that accomplishes the following:

• Allows for an orderly, dignified press conference, as befits the Prime Minister of the country.
• Fairly apportions questions between French and English media.
• Fairly apportions questions among different media organizations
• Allows the PMO to moderate the press conference.

And so here’s the plan the bureau chiefs came up and which was unanimously passed by members of the Press Gallery:

PROTOCOL FOR NEWS CONFERENCES
The Bureau Chiefs' reached a consensus on a protocol for [the Prime Minister’s] news conferences.

If the proposal receives the approval of the membership, the Parliamentary Press
Gallery Executive will approach the Prime Minister's Office. (ED NOTE: This approval was given today)

The proposal is simple and straightforward and favors no organization over the other

Here is how it would work:

Two microphones will be set up when the Prime Minister holds news conferences. One
microphone will be for the Francophone media and the other for the English-speaking
media.

One reporter from each news organization will line up on a first-come-flrst-served basis.

The Press Gallery staff will monitor the line to ensure the rotation is maintained by news
organizations.

Reporters will ask questions on a rotation from English to French.
Each news organization gets only one question in the first round. Each news organization gets only one question if there is a second or third round.

The PMO will call out the name of the reporter and news organization standing at the microphone.

Now we’re off to the PMO. We hope they like the cut of Mr. Brennan’s jib.

Pollster Decima has tongues in Ottawa wagging tonight and rightfully so. The Conservatives widen their lead over the Liberals and the Green Party is in a tie with and may even be more popular than the NDP. Here's the national numbers according to Decima:

1. Conservatives – 36%
2. Liberals – 27 %
3. NDP – 13 %
4. Green Party – 13 %

In Ontario, the Conservatives are positively giddy about these numbers:

1. Conservatives – 40 %
2. Liberals – 32 %
3. NDP – 15 %
4. Green Party – 13 %

Decima does not yet have the poll up on its Web site as I type this (late Thursday night Ottawa time) but I suspect they might have more information up on Friday. The poll, which was provided to The Canadian Press, claims that it is accurate to within 3.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Here's how the popular vote came down in the last federal election:

1. Conservatives – 36 %
2. Liberals – 30 %
3. NDP – 18 %
4. Bloc Quebecois – 11 %
5. Green Party – 5 %

I find the Green Party's rise fascinating but I wonder how 'hard' this Green Party support is. In other words, I wonder if an election were indeed held tomorrow whether much of that Green support would evaporate and drift back to the mainstream parties — probably the Liberals and the NDP more so than the Bloc and the Conservatives. I suspect — though I have no polling data to support this — that many Green Party supporters are dissatisfied with the mainstream parties and are 'parking' their vote with the Greens, telling pollsters or anyone else who asks that they are looking long and hard at Elizabeth May and her band of revolutionaries but hoping that their dalliance with the Greens forces change at the parties they've traditionally supported.

Technorati Tags: polls

The New York Times opines on the recent decision of Canada’s Supreme Court to declare security certificates unconstitutional. :

“The United States was not the only country to respond to the horror of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with policies that went much too far in curtailing basic rights and civil liberties in the name of public safety. Now we see that a nation can regain its senses after calm reflection and begin to rein back such excesses, but that heartening news comes from Canada and not the United States . . .

…Lawmakers have only to look to the Canadian court for easy-to-follow directions back to the high ground on basic human rights and civil liberties.

[Read the whole editorial]

 

Spending on federal government cultural programs is often seen as the litmus test between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives often view such spending with a sceptical eye; liberals, particularly in Canada, tend to place a higher priority on such spending. Or at least that’s the theory.

In the Main Estimates for fiscal 2008, which ends on March 31, 2008, tabled this morning by the Conservative government, spending on all cultural programs will total about $3.87-billion, or about $1.84 for every $100 of government spending. So how does that compare to previous years? Well, overall  spending in fiscal 2008 on cultural  programs like Parks Canada or the CBC or federal museums, will be $14.5-million or 0.4 per cent less than Fiscal 2007. But spending on cultural programs in the second year of Stephen Harper's Conservative government will be $509-million or 15.2 per cent more than it was in in fiscal 2006, the last year of Paul Martin's Liberal government.
Again: the Tories, in fiscal 2008 will allocate about $1.84 of every $100 of federal spending on cultural programs. In fiscal 2007, the proportion was a little higher – about $1.95 per $100 but it was just $1.81 per $100 for the last year of Paul Martin's government.

The single biggest item of cultural program spending is the cost of operating the Department of Canadian Heritage – about $1.4-billion  in fiscal 2008.
The second biggest, though, is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, which will receive 27 per cent or $1.05-billion of all federal tax dollars that will be spent on cultural programs in fiscal 2008. The CBC got a bigger slice of the cultural pie under the Liberals in fiscal 2006, with 29.2 per cent of all cultural spending even though the overall amount was smaller at $982-million.
The amount of federal tax dollars going to the CBC grew between fiscal 2006, the last year of the Martin Liberals and fiscal 2007, the first year of the Harper Conservatives, from $982-million to $1.1-billion. But funding to the CBC from the federal treasury has been trimmed for fiscal 2008 by $68-million or 6.1 per cent.

The biggest winners in terms of increases for Fiscal 2008 compared to Fiscal 2007 for cultural spending:

• Canada Council for the Arts. Will receive $181-million from the treasury, up $31-million  or 20.5 per cent from fiscal 2007 and up $31-million or 20.7 per cent compared to fiscal 2006.
• Canadian Museum of Nature. Will receive $84-million, up $25-million or 42 per cent compared to FY07 and up 28.7-million or 52 per cent compared to FY06.
• Parks Canada Agency. Will receive $599-million in FY08, up $21.2-million or 3.7 per cent compared to FY07 and up $114-million or 23.7 per cent compared to FY06.
• Library and Archives Canada. Will receive $119-million, up $10.2-million or 9.4 per cent compared to FY07 and $26.4-million or 28 per cent compared to FY06.

The CBC takes the biggest year-over-year hit among cultural spending items. The other losers for cultural spending in fiscal 2008 are:

• The Deparment of Canadian Heritage. Spending is cut to $1.4-billion, down $21-million or 1.6 per cent compared to FY07 but still up $244-million or 21.9 per cent compared to FY06.
• Telefilm Canada. Spending cut to $104.6-million, down $20.4-million or 16.3 per cent compared to FY07 and down $19.2-million or 15.5 per cent compared to FY06.
• Status of Women – Office of the Coordinator. Spending cut to $19.9-million, down $4.7-million or 19.2 per cent compared to FY07 and down $3.5-million or 15 per cent compared to FY06.

Spending on social programs, including major transfer programs like EI and Old Age Security, will continue to be Ottawa's single biggest program expense, according to the government's Main Estimates for fiscal 2008.
The federal government is asking Parliamentary approval to spend $97.4-billion on social programs, an increase of 7.7 per cent or $7-billion from fiscal 2007.
Spending on social programs as a portion of all government spending continues to rise, as well. In fiscal 2008, 46.3 cents of every dollar Ottawa spends will be go to social programs, up from 45.5 cents of every dollar in the current fiscal year, which ends on March 31 and up from 44.8 cents in fiscal 2006.

The other big-ticket program areas for Ottawa in fiscal 2008, which runs from April 1, 2007 to March 31, 2008 are:

• Public Debt charges: $34.7-billion in FY08, up $302-million or 0.9 per cent over FY07 and down $1.2-billion or 3.3 per cent from FY06. Public debt charges, as a portion of all program spending is steadily shrinking. In FY08, 16.5 cents of every dollar spent by Ottawa goes to service the debt, down from 19.3 cents in FY06.
• General Government Services: $24.3-billion in FY08, up $817-million or 3.5 per cent in FY07 and up $3.4-billion or 16.1 per cent from FY06. The government spends about 11.5 cents of every dollar of program spending on general government services.
• International, immigration and defence program spending: $23.9-billion in FY08, up $1.8-billion or 8.2 per cent from FY07 and up $3.5-billion or 17 per cent from FY06.
• Environment and resource-based program spending: $7.8-billion in FY08, up $1-billion or 14.7 per cent compared to FY07 and up $1.6-billion or  25.7 per cent compared to FY06. Spending on environment and natural resources programs account for less than four cents of every dollar spent by the federal government.

The federal government tabled 2007-2008 Main Estimates this morning. The Estimates, as they’re known, are pages and pages and pages of tables that detail where Ottawa plans to spend its billions of dollars. The Estimates are produced as support documents for the legislation that will be tabled in the House of Commons that MPs will vote on giving the government the authority to actually spend money. 

The estimates tabled today do not contain any new spending announcements or any other initiatives that have not been covered either in Budget 2006 or other previously announced documents such as the November Fiscal and Economic Update.

Through the 2007-2008 Estimates process, MPs are being asked to let the government spend $211.7-billion worth of tax dollars in the fiscal year beginning April 1, 2007 and ending on March 31, 2008. That represents an increase of $11.7-billion or six per cent over the previous year which ends on March 31, 2007. Last year, the House of Commons voted to allow the government to spend $199.7-billion worth of tax dollars in fiscal 2007.

That figure, though, doesn't represent all federal government spending – only the spending of tax dollars. The government also earns revenue from user fees, rents and other non-tax charges and usually spends most of it.  So, afer adding up all the spending that is supported by tax and non-tax sources of revenue, the figure for total federal government spending for fiscal 2008 is estimated to be about $230-billion.  That's an increase of $25.6-billion or 12.5 per cent compared to the previous year.

The single biggest group of expenses the government will incur this year will be benefits paid to the elderly. Ottawa will transfer about $32-billion to individuals in the form of Old Age Security Pensions, the Guaranteed Income Supplement and other programs for seniors. For fiscal 2008, the cost of  elderly benefits will rise by about 5 per cent compared to fiscal 2007 and will have risen 11 per cent compared to fiscal 2006.

The cost to service the public debt in fiscal 2008 will be $34.7-billion, a slight increase of 0.9 per cent compared to last year, but more than $1-billion 3.3 per cent less than fiscal 2006.

Ottawa will transfer about $40-billion to other levels of government in the next fiscal year, an increase  of about $2-billion or 5.2 per cent over the previous year. But CTV News calculates that the growth in transfers from Ottawa to other levels of government will have grown 23.4 per cent over the two year period ending March 31, 2008.

“Transfers to persons” – the money Ottawa sends out to individuals in the form of employment insurance, old age benefits and the new universal child care benefit – will total nearly $50-billion in fiscal 2008, an increase of 8.7 per cent compared to fiscal 2007 and an increase of 12.5 per cent over compared to two years ago.

 

 

 

 

The week in Parliament ended with the Liberals accusing the Conservatives of trying to obliterate the Liberals from the history books.

“I have no doubt in my mind that they would try to eradicate everything that has been good by the Liberal party and by great Liberals in this country from the history books if they could. Fortunately right now, they can't, but it just again speaks to the nature of this particular Conservative government. They see bad in everybody else except themselves. They don't see the good in what – not only what the Liberals have done in this country, but what non-Conservatives have done in this country and I don't think that is a good example for us as Canadians,” said Liberal MP Todd Russell.

Of course, in the middle of the week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper tried to insinuate that the Liberals were not prepared to extend anti-terrorism legislation in order to protect a relative of a Liberal MP. The Liberals literally shouted the PM down — and were then criticized for uncivil behaviour for failing to show appropriate respect to the office of Prime Minister. Russell was having none of that line of thinking.

“I wouldn't care who he is,” Russell told me outside the Commons yesterday. “When he attacks the character of another person, when he slanders another person, when he smears another person with no evidence, when he makes these accusations against a member of parliament, he needs to be shouted down. He needs to be put back on his heels and put in his place. I mean him of all people should set a certain standard in the House. He should set a certain way of behaving that all of us in Canada can be proud of and he shamed us all.”

NDP Leader Jack Layton ended up playing the role of adult:

“It was a bad week. I think if the Canadian people had been able to watch the full goings-on, I think they would have been very discouraged and distressed. The kinds of partial half-truths accusations flying back and forth, the yelling, the shouting, even the speaker had to take the right of a party that was raising a ruckus away. So it is time to get back to recognize that we need some decorum, that everyone in that House deserves respect because Canadians sent them there.”

But back to the history books —

Liberal MP Maria Minna had this question in the House of Commons Friday:

Hon. Maria Minna (Beaches—East York, Lib.): 
    Mr. Speaker, Liberal Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson's Nobel Peace Prize, earned for his peacekeeping interventions during the 1956 Suez crisis, has been hidden for the foreign affairs minister's press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Such action is a disgrace and an embarrassment. This attempt to hide the past just highlights the Conservative Party's abandonment of Canada's peacekeeping role.

    Why are the Conservatives so overly partisan that they cannot even recognize such great Canadian accomplishments?

We went out and answered that one for her:

…CTV News has learned that the Pearson display was routinely hidden by backdrops set up for the press conferences of Liberal ministers during the governments of Paul Martin and Jean Chretien.

[Read the rest of the story]

One of the first things the veterans here in the CTV Parliamentary Bureau — guys with names like Fife, Oliver and Duffy — said when I embarked on my first election campaign was that any pollster who tries to foist seat projections on you should be avoided at all costs. “Voodoo polling!”, they told me. So with that as a warning, let me do a little voodoo.

Grabbing the data from Elections Canada, I looked through the riding-by-riding results and applied the most recent poll numbers supplied to us from our pollster, The Strategic Counsel, against the results for the Jan. 23, 2006 election. So, for example, if the Green Party grabbed 4 per cent of the national vote at election time and our pollster says that 12 per cent of Canadians would now vote Green, I simply multipled the number of votes each Green candidate in the last election received by three. I did this for each of the five major parties and I used the regional results — Quebec, Ontario, West, “Rest of Canada” — where applicable. The Conservatives in the last election took 36 per cent of the national vote but our pollster says they now have 34 per cent of the national vote. So my method would be to multiply the votes of all the Conservative candidates by 0.9444 because 34 per cent support is 94.44 per cent of 36 per cent.

So I figured out the ‘multiplier’ for each party in each region; applied that multiplier to the last election results; and then took a look at what happened. 

Well, you won’t be surprised to hear that, in Alberta, even if every Green candidate tripled their votes, it still wouldn’t be enough to knock off any Conservative candidate who gets 94.44 per cent of what they got on Jan. 23. Following along?

Now, I’m sure professional statisticians would find this methodology highly error-prone. I’m not accounting for any margins of error in the polling data and the margin of error is very high for some of the regional data. And I’m not accounting for some unique races (say Jack Layton vs Bob Rae in Toronto-Danforth) that might happen in the next election. And I’m also giving Halton back to the Tories and Vancouver-Kingsway back to the Liberals.

Still, the results, below, I think, give those of us, like me, who believe that the cards just aren’t right for anyone right now to call an election. There just doesn’t seem to be much movement between the two major government-forming parties.

So with all that pre-amble, here’s my guess at what the results would look like if we were to have an election tomorrow and everyone voted pretty much the way they told our pollster last week:

A Conservative Minority Government with the following seat allocation:

1. Conservatives: 121 (net loss of four seats)
2. Liberals: 109 (Net gain of eight seats*)
3. BQ: 56 (Net gain of five seats)
4. NDP: 21 (Net loss of eight seats)
5. Independent: 1 (no change)
6. Greens: 0

* The vacant seat – Outremont — was held by a Liberal so this gain of one seat comes at no other party’s expense.

Some observations:

• By and large, where Conservatives won, they would win big again. So small changes in the vote totals either way won’t affect their overall seat standing.
• In Quebec, the Conservatives just squeaked by the BQ candidate in many ridings and so, a slight loss of Conservative support and slight increase in BQ support would knock Conservatives out. The Liberals who have won in Quebec have healthy margins and their support is slightly better now than it was on Jan. 23. Of some note, in my list below, I have two Conservative Cabinet ministers who could be vulnerable.
• The NDP takes the biggest hit. Their gains on Jan. 23 were in races where they just squeaked in. But that support isn’t there now and the Liberals would benefit most from the lost NDP support. And if people are criticizing Stephane Dion for taking his party to the left, well, perhaps these numbers might give you a sense of why that might be a smart move.
• The Greens might finish second in some races but, based on the polling numbers, they’re still not strong enough in any one riding to win.

So who’s at risk of losing their seat? Here’s my list:

PROV	RIDING	OUT		IN
BC	Burnaby–Douglas	Bill Siksay	NDP	Liberal
BC	Vancouver Kingsway	David Emerson	Conservative	Liberal
BC	West Vancouver–Sunshine Coast–Sea to Sky Country	Blair Wilson	Liberal	Conservative
NS	West Nova	Robert  Thibault	Liberal	Conservative
ON	Halton	Garth Turner	Liberal	Conservative
ON	Hamilton East–Stoney Creek	Wayne Marston	NDP	Liberal
ON	Hamilton Mountain	Chris Charlton	NDP	Liberal
ON	London–Fanshawe	Irene Mathyssen	NDP	Liberal
ON	Mississauga–Streetsville	Wajid Khan	Conservative	Liberal
ON	Ottawa Centre	Paul Dewar	NDP	Liberal
ON	Parkdale–High Park	Peggy Nash	NDP	Liberal
ON	Parry Sound–Muskoka	Tony Clement	Conservative	Liberal
ON	Sault Ste. Marie	Tony Martin	NDP	Liberal
ON	Trinity–Spadina	Olivia Chow	NDP	Liberal
QC	Beauport–Limoilou	Sylvie Boucher	Conservative	BQ
QC	Charlesbourg–Haute-Saint-Charles	Daniel Petit	Conservative	BQ
QC	Jonquière–Alma	Jean-Pierre Blackburn	Conservative	BQ
QC	Louis-Hébert	Luc Harvey	Conservative	BQ
QC	Pontiac	Lawrence Cannon	Conservative	BQ
QC	Outremont	Vacant	Vacant	Liberal
SK	Desnethé–Missinippi–Churchill River	Gary Merasty	Liberal	Conservative

 

Earlier this month, Liberal MP Mike Savage unearthed the thousands of dollars Heritage Minister Bev Oda spent renting limousines while she attended the Juno Awards in Halifax. Today, the Liberals jumped on Immigration Minister Diane Finley for thousands she spent on limousines to attend what the Liberals say were essentially photo ops. Here’s the Liberal press release:

Today in Question Period the Liberal Opposition detailed expenses incurred by former Human Resources Minister Diane Finley while she was doing photo ops on child care, affordable housing and student jobs.

The following documents were obtained under Access to Information:

1) An expense claim for $2,222.56 billed by Minister Finley for July 16-17, 2006, for “UCCB [Universal Child Care Benefit] cheque presentation in Winnipeg.”

2) A $752.60 “Canada Limousine Inc.” invoice dated August 8, 2006, for service in July, marked “to be paid by Dept. UCCB Cheque presentation to and from airport.”

3) A $1,600.34 travel claim dated July 18, 2006, for Conservative staffer Colleen Cameron marked “presentation of a symbolic UCCB cheque to a family with children in Winnipeg.”

4) A limo bill of $861.35 for the Minister to attend a “Confederation Club Speakers Luncheon meeting” on April 20, 2006.

5) Three limo bills from September 2006:

– $862 to attend the Western Fair on September 8, 2006, noting expense to “wait 4 hrs.”
– $690 for the Vediroc Affordable Housing Announcement on September 7, 2006, as described on HRSD proactive disclosure website.
– $297.50 for travel from the Airport to the Toronto Royal York Hotel on September 6, 2006.

-30-

These documents is available at:

http://www.liberal.ca/pdf/docs/070219_uccb_cheque_presentation.pdf