Peering into tomorrow, blind as a bat

Nothing has changed since I wrote this post nearly three months ago.

…but when there’s this many clowns tumbling out of a Volkswagen marked “accountability and transparency,” nobody should be surprised when it starts to draw a crowd. Bruce Campion-Smith’s Star story is in some ways the funniest one about the doofus-stricken agency in weeks.

Last autumn I interviewed Neil Turok, the South African physicist who runs the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo. Our talk began in expected places and ended somewhere unusual, with Turok making a pitch for “smart aid” to Africa: an approach based on keeping some of the continent’s best minds at home, and sending them reinforcements from around the world to make Africa, at last, a centre of creation and discovery instead of subsistence and strife. Sounds mad, doesn’t it. But Turok has credentials: his African Institute for Mathematical Sciences is well begun and, he hopes, will soon have branches across the continent. The whole interview is worth re-reading, but here’s the part that launches our discussion of some tremendously exciting ideas, coming from a Canadian with African roots, that I want to share with you today. Turok told me:

Indeed [in 2010] the G-8 will be meeting alongside the G-20. And Canada was instrumental in pushing for the G-20’s creation. So Canada can be influential, because of its own history and the way it is trusted around the world. Use that. Use the fact that Canada has an excellent public education system, excellent university system — use that as leverage for your aid to Africa, to try to help Africa put in place a similarly strong health-care, university, science, innovation system. Doing that, you’re building on your strengths. The rewards will be enormous.

Which brings us to David Strangway. It was Turok himself, during a stop in Ottawa a few weeks ago, who mentioned Strangway’s “Academic Chairs for Africa” program. It’s gathering support around the world, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been urged to put it on the agenda for discussion at the Muskoka G8 and Toronto G20 this June. But I don’t believe a large Canadian news organization has told you anything about it before now. Continue…

From the magazine’s print edition, my new column offers very modest amounts of praise for Michael Ignatieff’s behaviour since Christmas.

…Max Bernier will just have to run to replace him.

Yesterday’s display of bulbous rubber noses and floppy shoes from the seven clowns running Rights and Democracy is wearyingly familiar in every particular.

Tossing a dart from across the room, I hit this passage, at random out of any number of others, to rebut: they write that the executive review committee “gave the former president repeated opportunities to meet and discuss the evaluation in Toronto, Ottawa or Montreal. He chose not to avail himself of those opportunities.”

Rémy Beauregard actually addressed that point in a long letter to the board of Rights and Democracy on Oct. 26, 2009. “With respect to the efforts made to accommodate the President for a meeting of the Committee,” he wrote, “it is important to clarify that of the 55 days proposed by the Secretary of the Board for such a meeting, the President indicated he was available for 45 of those days.”

Then why was there no meeting? Because, as I’ve learned when trying to seek comment from them, Aurel Braun and his pals can be difficult to pin down. Continue…

Lucien Bouchard, whose government maintained a cap on tuitions at Quebec universities, urges Jean Charest, whose government has been increasing tuition fees at a timid rate of $50 per semester, to blow the doors off and let tuition rates rise to the national (that is, Canadian) average. I am hunkering down while the CFS loads its muskets. Many years ago I spent weeks here writing arguments that closely resemble Bouchard’s. The archives of this blog being a bit of a fragile flower, you’ll just have to take my word for it.

The seven members of the Rights and Democracy board who support Chairman Aurel Braun are back in the pages of the National Post today, with a concerted effort to explain their side of the current dispute. This is the first time they have submitted such a piece of writing since Jan. 20, and anything from this majority faction of the board deserves the attention of readers who have been following this story closely. In part, the Braun faction’s op-ed stands as a sort of answer to the questions I put to Braun and Jacques Gauthier earlier this month. Since Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon’s actions yesterday amount to a wholehearted endorsement by the Government of Canada of everything Braun and the board have done in recent months, that’s all the more reason to consider carefully the board majority’s arguments.

So once again, here is a link to the full op-ed, which I encourage you to read. Here are a few key paragraphs:

First some facts, which seem to have eluded critics of the Rights & Democracy board. Every Canadian member of the board was appointed by the current government, including those who are vociferously supporting the late former president, Rémy M. Beauregard, and who are openly hostile to the rest of the board. The government appointed Mr. Beauregard as well. Most members of the board have no prior political affiliation; a recently appointed board member is a well-known Liberal. Clearly, the board wasn’t “stacked.” The only discernible pattern is that board members were appointed to bring governance to Rights & Democracy. There is no imposition of a right-wing agenda, no interference in autonomy.

Accountability and transparency are the true issues. A December 2007 report by the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Office of the Inspector‑General discovered “persistent … accountability … problems” with Rights & Democracy, which regrettably remain. Whether it was the finance and audit committee requesting timely and adequate information; members seeking proper clarification of the operations of the Geneva office; explanations about a $100,000 expenditure which raised questions; or information about how $300,000 a year in discretionary funds was spent, we on the board have been stymied.

…The former president’s death was a gateway to surreality. Conflict entrepreneurs in the Canadian and Middle East political trenches could not resist interfering. Instead of determining how to resolve a real battle between those supportive of accountability and those who opposed it, Canadians have ended up debating the imaginary impact of the government’s Middle East agenda on Rights & Democracy.

Those of us responsible for the governance of the organization do not have the luxury of fighting national or Middle Eastern fantasy battles. Ensuring accountability and transparency is far less exciting than debating Canadian and Middle East politics. Yet, that is our task….

I’ll respond to these arguments tomorrow.

(UPDATE, Tuesday at noon: Jacques Gauthier replies to this post in the comments below. For readers’ convenience, I have reproduced Gauthier’s comment at the bottom of this post. — pw)

A letter arrived today at the Montreal office of Samson Bélair/ Deloitte et Touche, the financial-services firm hired by Rights and Democracy interim president Jacques Gauthier on Friday to conduct a forensic audit of the firm’s financial activities over the past five years. The letter is signed by several senior members of the Rights and Democracy staff. It is a blockbuster.

The letter’s authors — France-Isabelle Langlois, Michael Wodzicki, Dominic Tremblay, Nicholas Galetti — demand to know the details of Samson Bélair’s mandate as a condition of their cooperation in the audit.

And they level serious allegations of their own at Gauthier, arguing in effect that if Samson Bélair wants to investigate mismanagement at Rights and Democracy, they might as well start at the top. Continue…

This one takes some twists and turns. Follow along!

Lawrence Cannon names Gérard Latulippe as president of Rights and Democracy. “An exceptionally qualified candidate,” says he. (Cannon also “expresses the Government of Canada’s support” for a forensic audit at an agency whose books are edited every year by the auditor general, an agency that was evaluated by Cannon’s own department in 2008 and found to have no irregularities in its books. A man of few words, or at least few coherent words, Cannon gives no explanation for his change of heart.)

Latulippe is the National Democratic Institute country director for Haiti. He has also worked for NDI in “countries such as Jordan, Libya, Iraq, Georgia, Mauritania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso and Egypt.” This blog is an unabashed fan of NDI, which admits a “loose affiliation” with the U.S. Democratic Party (its loose-affiliation counterpart is the International Republican Institute, and here at Inkless, we like them too.) NDI is a world leader in educating political parties about their own countries’ political systems and ensuring that elections are fought vigorously and fairly. But, as that notorious opponent of transparency and accountability Ed Broadbent likes to point out, Rights and Democracy has a broader mandate than NDI and IRI. That’s the “Rights” bit, which consists in advocating for the basic human rights of speech, association and so on, down to something as basic as the right to food in Malawi. Latulippe may be able to learn new tricks, but he will have to, because Rights and Democracy isn’t NDI, nor is it the “Canadian Centre for Advancing Democracy” advocated by Stephen Fletcher based on a report by Tom Axworthy and… and…

…Éric Duhaime?

Oh now that’s interesting. This corner is also fond of Duhaime (we like everyone today!), a wisecracking, whip-smart political staffer from Quebec City who served as an advisor to Mario Dumont right up until Dumont left his ADQ party in a flaming wreck. But before that, Duhaime ran the Quebec desk at the Office of the Leader of the Opposition back when the Leader of the Opposition was the then-beleaguered Stockwell Day. (Before that he was an advisor to Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe, forcing this other Éric Duhaime to note that he is “not the Éric Duhaime who changes political parties the way he changes shirts.”)

But I digress. Except I don’t, really, because when Duhaime, who now wants a Canadian equivalent of NDI, was working in Stock’s shop, the Canadian Alliance’s Quebec political lieutenant was… Gérard Latulippe. “Stockwell Day is our leader, he is the only one who can win in every region of Canada,” reads a letter by Quebec Stockaholics that Latulippe signed when things got a bit dicey. Continue…

The Rights and Democracy board announces it has hired Samson Belair/Deloitte and Touche to rummage through the agency’s books for the past five years. Reporters are invited to direct their inquiries to the new freelance communications company that interim president Jacques Gauthier has hired, to go along with the freelance office manager, the freelance private investigator, and the blue-chip audit firm he’s put on the public payroll in his never-ending efforts to get value for the taxpayer dollar. Now, guess who picks up the phone when you call Prima Communication. Go ahead, guess. Give up? Hint.

UPDATE: Peter Stockland writes in the comments to this post:

No, it wasn’t, Paul. It had nothing to do with why I was in Ottawa. But you wouldn’t know that because even though you know me personally, you didn’t give me the courtesy of contacting me before posting this or sending out a Tweet suggesting some kind of nefarious agenda on my part. If you had bothered to contact me, you would have learned that I am trying to help the board of Rights and Democracy resolve exactly the sorts of issues you raised in your earlier blog about waiting 10 days to get answers. So, now we know what I am doing. But the followup questions arises: what are you doing, Paul? What kind of journalism are you doing these days? What is YOUR agenda that requires using nameless single sources, drive-by personal smears, groundless accusations? Who are you playing to exactly? I’d like to know.

This afternoon we taped tonight’s edition of TVO’s The Agenda With Steve Paikin. The topic for most of the hour was the recent controversy at Rights and Democracy. (Click the “Rights and Democracy” tag at the bottom of this post and it will take you to everything I’ve written on the agency. There’s a lot.)

As a sort of warm-up, I thought it’d be good to share the correspondence I had with the chairman of the Rights and Democracy board, Aurel Braun, and the interim president, Jacques Gauthier, who is also a board member, before I wrote this article. I think the questions I asked them are still germane, and 10 days after I asked them, perhaps these busy men have managed to come up with some answers. Let’s find out. Continue…

It was noon on the day of his latest artistic triumph, and Hal Willner was running late. “Sorry, man,” he said to me as he walked into Vancouver’s Queen Elizabeth Theatre, where a dozen musicians were beginning rehearsals for his Neil Young Project, part of the Cultural Olympiad that serves as a running performing-arts sidecar to the Vancouver Olympics. “I knew we were going to do this, and I was into talking, but then I thought, nah, I need another hour of sleep.”

What he was here to talk about was a sprawling tribute to the Canadian rock icon Neil Young, which was to be performed Thursday and Friday night, featuring just about everyone except Neil Young: Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, the singer Emily Haines from Metric, Ron Sexsmith, Colin James, Julie Doiron, members of Broken Social Scene and the usual motley crew of session men, lounge lizards, jazz astronauts and other eccentrics who always fill out one of Willner’s shows.

The 53-year-old Philadelphia native has been doing this sort of thing for close to 30 years. His tribute albums to other woolly geniuses — Nino Rota, Kurt Weill, Thelonious Monk — are the stuff of legend. He has been the musical director for Saturday Night Live since 1980. He did a Leonard Cohen tribute in 2006 in Brooklyn, with Canadian consulate money, and that led to this, somehow. Anyone who has followed Willner knows it will be incontestably one of the cultural highlights of this Olympic-fevered Vancouver winter.

Continue…

“Please can you tell me,” the Serbian journalist asked me, “is this jewelry store company based here? Or is it more… East-coast?”

“Birks?” I replied. “It’s based in Montreal.”

“Ah. So, East-coast,” he said, with an I’m-a-man-of-the-world, you-don’t-have-to-spoonfeed-me glint in his eye. “Well, closer to the East coast, anyway.”

My Serbian colleague, who soon introduced himself as Vladimir Petrovic from DSL Sport newspaper, was, with me, one of the very few men attending the unveiling of a new Jennifer Heil line of silver jewelry at the Vancouver Birks flagship outlet on West Hastings. There was Starbucks coffee in silver puts. There were smoked-salmon canapés. There were many online style writers. “Oh yes! I read you on Twitter,” one said to another.

Making small talk, I asked Petrovic how many athletes there are on the Serbian Olympic team. “Eleven,” he said. “I’d have thought Serbia could field a hockey team,” I said.

“Slovenia can. Under the old Yugoslavia, 90 per cent of our hockey team was Slovenian. Now we don’t have enough,” he said. His paper used to be called JSL Sport, for Jugoslovenski Sporti List, or Yugoslavian Sporting Newspaper. Now it’s called Dnevni Sporti List, for Daily Sporting Newspaper.

I was scribbling something else in my notebook so I set out to reassure Petrovic. “I’m not taking notes about this.”

He shrugged and smiled. “Oh, you can make jokes about this! I don’t mind. I make jokes all the time. In Salt Lake City, Grimaldi, from Monaco, he finished the bobsled race on his head. He was one of a two-man bobsled and it turned over and he ended the race on his head. With the sled on top of him. And he still finished ahead of the Serbians.”

The main event, of course, was the arrival of Jenn Heil, whom the Birks publicity material identified as Gold Medallist Jenn Heil. Not incorrectly, either: she won gold in Turin. Here of course she won silver, Canada’s first medal of the games, and when she showed up, all bright eyes and wide smiles, she was wearing her medal, which was about the size of a pie plate and had an uneven, curvy surface.

Fiona Forbes, a local TV personality, approached a lectern near the coffee. “Please turn off your phones,” she said. “Especially if you have a Lady Gaga ringer.” Busted.

There were remarks from assorted jewelry dignitaries. Turns out this is the first time in Olympic history that the Games have designated an official supplier in the category of luxury jewelry. Really, you’d have thought they’d done it earlier. It turns out, too, that Jenn Heil’s line of products is in silver, but that this was going to be the case even before she fetched up silver at Cypress Mountain. There were no gold or bronze contingency plans.

She designed them herself, “in collaboration with the Birks design team.” Everything’s based on five rings, which is Olympic-ish and also reflects five “core values” Heil wanted to promote: courage, joy, focus, team and hope. “We are constantly inspired by her,” one Birks guy said. “As genuine a human being as you’d ever want to meet.” A Birks PR lady from Montreal pointed out to me that a line of jewelry associated with a 26-year-old athlete is pretty handy for the company, which doesn’t want to seem old and fusty.

Heil made grateful remarks and unveiled two new products—stackable bangles and stackable rings. There were many, many photos. The wee Olympian stayed cheerful through it all.

“She’s clearly, how do you call it, a hot dog,” Petrovic said as we watched the mogul star. “That’s why she can do her sport. It’s why she enjoys this.”