Cut and won

David Matas’ letter, posted in its entirety below, gives such free play to misdirection, tautology and double-standard that one hardly knows where to begin picking it apart. But let’s start at the heart of his argument, which is that since the staff of the organization had “no dispute over policy” with the board, the staff has no right to disagree with the board over anything. Continue…

Rights and Democracy board member David Matas was good enough to send along this new text about the dispute at the Montreal organization. (Today’s Globe story is one place you could go to get caught up on the controversy so far.) It’s a rather bold attempt to persuade everyone that there’s no reason to fuss. I’ll be writing more about Rights and Democracy this weekend. But first, since Matas is much better about getting back to me than Aurel Braun has been, it’s only fair to give him his say. What follows are Matas’s words, not mine:



Reframing

(A comment on the media controversy surrounding Rights and Democracy)

by David Matas

Remy Beauregard, the former president of Rights and Democracy, died of a heart attack the night of January 7, 2010. Some of the staff of Rights and Democracy in the name of all of them released a letter dated January 11, 2010 calling on the leadership of the Board of Directors to resign, accusing them of harassment of the former president. The accusation of harassment was directed against the chair and vice-chair of the Board, Aurel Braun and Jacques Gauthier, and the chair of the audit and finance committee, Elliot Tepper.

The letter did not indicate what was the activity of the Board members which caused concern. The fact that the charge was levied against the leadership of the Board indicated that in substance the issue was rather about the role of the Board. The letter itself hinted at this, accusing the three of having a “complete misunderstanding of your role as Directors”. Continue…

Many of you have already found my column from the print edition, in which I try to make sense of Jim Prentice’s Calgary speech. Much hilarity ensues. Okay, not that much.

From last October, the then-president of Rights and Democracy, Rémy Beauregard, speaks to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee about the work he did improving the management of the Montreal human-rights organization. Others have been making allegations lately about the work Beauregard did so I thought it was fair to let him speak for himself.

From yesterday’s Power Play with Tom Clark on CTV News Channel, footage of most of the show, featuring Ed Broadbent complaining about the goings-on at Rights and Democracy; Aurel Braun complaining about Ed Broadbent; MPs complaining about Rights and Democracy, except for the Conservative fellow who complains about Paul Dewar; and Mike Robinson and Rick Anderson, rising above the fray. I had believed only Steve Paikin, on the public broadcaster TVO, would be able to devote a full hour to this controversy. Tom Clark is full of surprises.

There was a journalists’ panel at the bottom of the hour, and the guy sitting next to Joel-Denis Bellavance sure had a lot to say, but that doesn’t appear to be part of the online archive.

UPDATE: From the Inkless emailbox, this missive from Ezra Levant.

Hi Paul. In your Power Play segment, you mentioned that the 2007 audit of R&D was leaked to me by Aurel Braun.

In fact, I did not receive it from him. And as you probably know, that audit was reveleaed in a scoop by the National Post’s Graeme Hamilton, based on an access to information request. You can read Hamilton’s original story on the audit here: http://ezralevant.com/Waste%20at%20R%26D.pdf

Cheers.

Ezra

Always happy to reflect other arguments. I’ll note, however, that I can’t find any reference to this later audit, which tells a dramatically different tale, anywhere on Ezra’s site.

In the Star, Haroon Siddiqui provides the latest update on the surreal weirdness convulsing the Montreal organization Rights and Democracy. Perhaps the most interesting part of this column is the following graf, about three Rights and Democracy grants to NGOs working in the Middle East, including Al Haq, the bête noire of the organization’s newly-installed board majority:

As it turned out, [now-deceased former R&D president Rémy] Beauregard had run the three grants by Cannon’s ministry, which approved. In fact, Al Haq had also received funding from CIDA. That was in keeping with the Canadian policy of promoting civil society in Palestinian territories to provide non-violent alternatives to terrorism. Al Haq was good enough for CIDA and foreign affairs but not [new board chairman Aurel] Braun and Co.

CIDA grants to Al Haq? I can find no direct record of that on the agency’s website (your help on this would be welcome) but I did find an awful lot of complaining about it, all from one source: Gerald Steinberg, who runs an Israeli organization called NGO Monitor. Its thesis is that international groups working to defend the rights of Palestinian Arabs are seeking to sap Israel’s defences. Steinberg’s a busy guy. Continue…

Peter Shawn Taylor has found a transit project so questionable I actually think even I wouldn’t support it: a light rail transit system in the Waterloo, Ont. downtown core.

I’ll let Peter (who often writes editorials, and sometimes articles, for us here at Maclean’s) make his argument for himself. Basically the Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge triangle is so diffuse there’s no critical mass of LRT ridership. Peter, being a good fiscal hawk, sees this as reason enough not to support any kind of big marquee transit project within Waterloo. I, on the other hand, am an extreme left-wing infrastructure empire-builder, so I have a fallback proposition. What KW really needs is a dramatically expanded transit system for getting people to and from the tri-city area. I believe there are two VIA milk runs per day from Toronto, and they take more than two hours to make the one-hour trip. Even by the existing standards of Go Transit, that’s nonsensical.

High-speed rail to KW, then? Not necessarily. Tripling the standard Via run would be nice. Opening a Go line would be nice. Even opening a dedicated lane on the highway and running a shuttle-bus service would help. Peter, who lives in Waterloo, is skeptical of its City-of-the-Future! self-image. I visit the region frequently enough to strongly suspect it really does have growth potential. But not if it remains hard to get at. So take some of the money that was going to go to LRT within Waterloo and use it for modest but real transit improvements between Toronto and KW. Yes? No? Discuss.

From the print edition, this week’s column offers what may — may — be a coda to all this Rights and Democracy foofaraw (see Inkless passim, ad nauseam). Actually it probably won’t be. About two hours after I filed this column, which rather daringly assumed the fight was going out of the new board majority’s opponents, I got word that the Globe was breaking the news of the Saturday burglary at Rights and Democracy. (This morning’s Citizen contains a tribute to former R&D president Rémy Beauregard, written before the new board chairman put a gag order on his staff.)

But this column is about the bigger picture, which is that a government with a minority in the House and a shaky command on public opinion is still the government. And if it is patient and aware of all the many ways it can exert influence, very few of which will even be noticed by the Parliament Hill hivemind, it can shift a society. Not by revolution, not even really by evolution, but essentially by erosion. Which is the way mountains generally move.

In trying to take the measure of this change, it is asinine to reduce conservatism, as some of my colleagues like to do, to the single question of budget balance, a test Ronald Reagan would have failed utterly. Chantal Hébert got closer to the truth when she wrote a very good line early in Harper’s first mandate, to the effect that whereas a lot of Canadians like to claim they are socially progressive and fiscally conservative, Harper’s government does things the other way around: It is fiscally profligate and socially conservative. What Chantal didn’t add, because it wasn’t yet clear, was that this stance, so at odds with what Hill lifers are used to, works for Harper and is just popular enough to keep him in office, which is all the popularity he needs.

Gerald Finley sings the showstopper from John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic. It’s the night before the Trinity explosion and Robert Oppenheimer has a lot on his mind; John Donne gives him words for his torment. I’ve posted a different video of this same aria before; sue me. It’s not perfect, but I found it deeply evocative when I heard Finley sing it at the San Francisco Opera in 2005 (for this profile).

Toronto’s Esprit Orchestra will perform this piece on Friday at the new Koerner Hall; if I had my act together I’d go. Under Alex Pauk’s artistic direction, Esprit plays only music of the 20th and 21st centuries. Friday’s show is a humdinger. It has distinct mushroom-cloud overtones, with the above Adams aria and Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody (To the Victims of Hiroshima), with the composer himself in attendance. R. Murray Schafer’s tuneful, dignified trumpet concerto, The Falcon’s Trumpet, will provide a respite from the evening’s darker material. I’ve had occasion to lament that Canadian compositions, once performed, too often vanish in libraries, never to be heard again. Pauk and Esprit are helping to remedy that by playing a Schafer piece at every concert this year. This is a crackerjack orchestra, thinking hard about what’s worth preserving and celebrating from the past half-century’s musical discovery. They’re playing in the most beautiful new concert hall in Canada. And tickets are $43. I’m kicking myself that I’ll miss it. Toronto readers with an ear for adventure should go in my place.

I’m going to encourage you to read Aaron’s post about the ridicule that was heaped on Jack Layton’s head when he suggested negotiating with the Taliban. That was, of course, the subject of today’s summit meeting in London. Also of course, a large number of Taliban will not be worth talking to because they will be incorrigible. Others who currently traffic under that loose title will be more amenable. But Layton was saying no different in 2006, and nobody should be surprised that Peter MacKay, among others, turned out to know a lot less than the guy he was mocking. This is a bit of a recurring theme in that minister’s career. Of course the people whose quotes Aaron compiles will either ignore this turn of events, or set about Jesuitically parsing their earlier statements to explain why they don’t look silly today. No matter. Kudos to the NDP leader.

Le Devoir’s Alec Castonguay has led on the Rights and Democracy story from the start, and he’s still at it. (If you’re new to the story, just order out for food and hit the “Rights and Democracy” tag under this blog post for a good six or eight hours’ reading.) Alec reports that Lawrence Cannon, the foreign minister, has dispatched an associate deputy minister to figure out what’s going on at the benighted Montreal GONGO.

Now, here’s the curious thing. The ADM in question is Gérald Cossette, whom I don’t know but who seems to be highly regarded at Fort Pearson and who has been tested under fire. He was in charge of passports when U.S. security worries led to a policy change that produced the largest ever surge in demand for Canadian passports. So he seems a serious fellow. But what strikes me as odd is that Cossette has also been co-chairing twice-daily meetings of a whole-of-government Haiti Crisis Team since the earthquake there. (The link takes you to a generally excellent overview of government response to the Haiti crisis, from Jeff Davis at Embassy. OK, OK, near Embassy at the Hill Times. )

It’s said that if you want something done, you should assign it to a busy man. Cossette certainly seems to fit that description. He’ll be reporting to the minister, which means the rest of us may or may not ever learn what he finds at Rights and Democracy.

I’m not asserting some enduring national character difference when I point out that Canada doesn’t have a political leader or a business leader right now who could begin to attract as much attention by giving a speech as Steve Jobs and Barack Obama did today. Nor indeed do we have a leader in either field, for the moment, who would even bother to try.

As I’ve pointed out before, Stephen Harper is the third prime minister in a row who will not make a big speech on television to put his case before the nation unless it’s his own political hide that’s in the balance, as Paul Martin did in 2005 and Jean Chrétien, perhaps a hair more nobly, did a week before the 1995 referendum. On the business side, try to imagine even the relatively flamboyant Mike Lazaridis or Jim Balsillie giving a big public speech to launch a new BlackBerry product. They never do. Continue…

The Globe breaks the latest in the increasingly weird tale of Rights and Democracy: on Saturday, while the staff of Rights and Democracy were at the funeral of former president Rémy Beauregard, somebody broke into the organization’s Montreal office and, it seems, stole two computers, including the one for R&D’s communications director.

The Globe is unable to find any hard evidence that would show this is anything more than a random break-in and an odd coincidence. Still, the paper is breaking this story legitimately because the question arises: what the hell is going on here?

For my money, almost the most interesting sentence in this whole story is the following: “Mr. Braun, a University of Toronto professor, issued a directive on Monday forbidding staff from any further public communication without prior written approval.” This from the guy who runs around accusing everybody else of being enemies of transparency. Recall that Aurel Braun teaches political science at one of our finer universities, not logic.