Ideas you can take from the bank

By Paul Wells - Monday, November 29, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 14 Comments

“One rarely has to wait long at Perimeter before somebody comes along with a gift of money,” I wrote in September in my account of a month at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.  Today will be another such day. But not nearly routine, even by the standards of such days.

This afternoon the usual suspect when it comes to funding for Perimeter, its founder and chairman Mike Lazaridis, will be joined at the big black building in Waterloo by a newcomer: Bill Downe, the CEO of BMO Financial Group. Downe’s bringing the cheque: $4 million to establish — deep breath — the “BMO Financial Group Isaac Newton Chair in Theoretical Physics at Perimeter Institute.”

The Institute’s endowment fund, kept full by Lazaridis, will match the bank’s donation to make $8 million. BMO’s $4 million is the largest single donation it has ever made to a science project. It is the largest corporate gift Perimeter has received in its decade of existence. And it marks a new moment for the science park, because it marks the first time it attracts serious private money from a source that didn’t get rich selling BlackBerrys. As we’ll see this is only the beginning of that trend. But it’s what Perimeter will do with the money that’s really intriguing.

The BMO Newton chair is the first of five endowed chairs Perimeter’s director, Neil Turok, wants to establish. (The others will be named after other historic discoverers, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein and Dirac.) The stated goal is “to attract five of the most influential theoretical physicists of our time.” Continue…

The Lynch mob

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 11:42 PM - 10 Comments

Oh come on, somebody had to use that pun. L. Ian MacDonald says the wrong man has been let go; John Ivison hears a fascinating (if baroque) theory that accountability silliness was blocking infrastructure spending, and Lynch took the fall. I’m proud of my old paper for providing such thoughtful analysis (OK, speculation) on what could be dismissed as an arcane story. I wonder what the Post‘s competition will come up with tomorrow. So far this story has slipped through the cracks on what is normally the Globe‘s very good Politics website.

UPDATE: Eight paragraphs in the other paper.

UPDATER: Of course Kathryn May has this as the line story in the Citizen, and the Globe has salvaged its virtue with this very late-breaking piece.

How Kevin Lynch announced his retirement

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 24 Comments

Kevin Lynch

This one comes in two parts. First, here are the talking points Conservative MPs and staffers have been given in case any pesky reporter calls around.

Media inquiries should be referred to Dimitri Soudas in the Prime Ministers Office.

The following information is provided as background:

The Prime Minister thanked Mr. Lynch for his tireless service and dedication to Canada. In recognition of his exceptional public service, Mr. Lynch will be sworn in as a member of the Queens Privy Council for Canada.

Mr. Wouters joined the federal public service in 1982 and is presently Secretary of the Treasury Board. His knowledge and experience will serve him well in the challenging role of Clerk of the Privy Council. Mr. Wouters was born in Edam, Saskatchewan.

The Government will continue to pursue its agenda, to fulfill its campaign commitments and to implement the Economic Action Plan.

Upon his retirement, Mr. Lynch will have served as Clerk for three years, four months. Since 1979, the average length of service for a Clerk has been three years, four months.

Now here’s how the deputy ministers’ morning meeting, chaired by Kevin Lynch at Langevin Block, went today.

Continue…

Kevin Lynch on the very challenging job he just left

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 1 Comment

From a McGill University speech last month. There’s a transcript in the new issue of Policy Options. (Our man John Geddes was one of the very few journalists to cover Lynch’s speech when he gave it. Here are John’s thoughts.)

Uncertainty is another fundamental characteristic of a crisis, the civilian equivalent of the “fog of war.” Unhelpfully, in this data-rich world, very few crises self-identify in advance, notwithstanding the experts who, in hindsight, had clearly “seen it coming.” Thus, to a very real extent, job number one in crisis management is not immediate policy action but the urgency of reducing uncertainty. …

How does all of this inform the principles of good public policy-making in a crisis? First, it is useful to remind ourselves that public servants don’t make policy decisions, elected governments do. The job of the public service is to provide governments with analytically rigorous, professional, unbiased policy options and recommendations.

A related observation is that the policy challenges of today are more complex than in years past, they are different, and they are less predictable.

…at no time has government needed a professional, non-partisan public service more than today as we face the most difficult international economic circumstances in recent history. A high-performing public service is crucial to Canada and Canadians as we work our way through these very uncertain times.

Walks in the snow: there was one moderating influence left, but he won't be troubling us any further, Guy

By Paul Wells - Thursday, May 7, 2009 at 9:07 AM - 6 Comments

Release

Date: May 7, 2009

For immediate release

PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER ANNOUNCES RETIREMENT OF KEVIN LYNCH, CLERK OF THE PRIVY COUNCIL

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced today the pending retirement of Kevin Lynch, Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet.

“Kevin Lynch has served the Government of Canada with great distinction, especially in his role as Clerk of the Privy Council since his appointment in 2006.  His long service as a distinguished public servant has earned him respect both nationally and internationally,” said the Prime Minister.

1. “On behalf of the Government of Canada,” the Prime Minister continued, “I want to thank him for his tireless service and dedication to his country.  On a more personal note, I want to acknowledge his tireless efforts and enthusiasm in helping the Government maintain a steady course through troubled economic times, our involvement in Afghanistan, and all the day-to-day challenges of a minority Parliament.”

Mr. Lynch’s retirement will be effective as of June 30, 2009.  In recognition of his exceptional service, the Prime Minister will swear in Mr. Lynch as a member of the Privy Council prior to his retirement.

See for yourself

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 1:11 AM - 0 Comments

The McGill panel discussion including Ian Brodie that John Geddes wrote about a couple weeks ago is now online.

CPAC has also uploaded three other sessions from the two-day policy conference: How Policy is Created in Crisis (William Watson, Mel Cappe, Phillippe Couillard and Peter Russell), Innovative Public Policy (Denis Saint-Martin, Leslie Pal, Pearl Eliadis, Mary Simon), and Media and Public Opinion (L. Ian MacDonald, Christopher Waddell, Nik Nanos, Sandra Buckler, Alain Dubuc).

Kevin Lynch’s keynote speech is here. Jim Flaherty’s is here.

'The most depressing thing you'll read today'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 27, 2009 at 3:42 PM - 0 Comments

Adam Radwanski points to John Geddes’ dispatch from Montreal.

And sometimes, the revolving door goes the other way.

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 12:20 AM - 29 Comments

Full disclosure: I have no idea what, if anything, the significance is of this latest addition to Team Ignatieff, but it does have a pleasing sort of unpredictability to it, if nothing else.

Ignatieff snags senior PCO bureaucrat as adviser

OTTAWA – Newly minted Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has snagged a senior adviser right out from under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s nose.

Sources confirmed late Tuesday that Kevin Chan, executive assistant and director to top federal bureaucrat Kevin Lynch, has joined Ignatieff’s team.

As clerk of the Privy Council Office, Lynch directly advises the prime minister on policy, administrative and political matters. He is the link between the Prime Minister’s Office and the deputy ministers who run each government department.

As Lynch’s right-hand man, Chan would presumably have had top secret clearance and access to all government confidential plans.

While secrecy oaths will prohibit him from divulging any confidential information in his new role in the Opposition Leader’s Office, he will take with him an in-depth knowledge of the way government works. Of more particular interest to Liberals, he’ll bring an insider’s view of the Harper regime’s style and modus operandi. [...]

What smells fishy?

By selley - Tuesday, November 25, 2008 at 1:45 PM - 12 Comments

Must-reads: John Ivison on abandoning Senate reform; Don Martin on embracing deficits; Jonathan Kay on the Bush legacy; Vaughn Palmer on the B.C. budget.

The federal miscellany
Deficits, unelected senators, anti-Semites, etc.

The Toronto Star’s James Travers fingers the “brainy, focused and tough” Kevin Lynch, clerk of the Privy Council, as a good candidate to replace Michael Wilson as ambassador to Washington. But he notes there are “flies in this ointment.” One fly: “renewing the civil service, the Sisyphean task that drew Lynch home [from a position at the IMF], remains a work in progress.” (Indeed, being a Sisyphean task, it could hardly be anything but “in progress.” But we really must stop parsing Travers’ metaphors so closely; it leads only to heartache.) Two flies: Lynch led the “usefully inconclusive investigation” into the NAFTA disasta, which is ostensibly why Wilson has to leave in the first place. And three flies: successor boulder-pushers at the PCO “are in short, surprisingly reluctant, supply.”

The Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson + fisheries quotas = barnburner! We kid. It’s a very sober and actually fairly interesting look at the benefits of switching from the “common property resource fishery” model—in which “the government establishes an elaborate system of allocations to fishermen and companies, all under the watchful (?) eye of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans”—to one in which “fishermen, communities, co-operatives or companies” are directly given “ownership rights to certain amounts of fish.” It’s better suited to sustainable fishing, we learn, because it takes politics largely out of the equation in establishing quotas. As it stands, “since people speak, and fish are silent, the minister usually heeds people/constituents and opens fisheries that should remain closed or raises allocations that should remain low.”

Continue…

Megapundit: What would Elton John do?

By selley - Thursday, November 13, 2008 at 2:11 PM - 1 Comment

Miscellaneous Canadian news
Canada’s pundits are still all over the shop.

The Calgary Herald’s Don Martin surveys the various motions and proposals up for discussion at the Tories’ convention in Winnipeg and concludes “the Conservatives have buried their old guard ways under a hefty slab of mainstream ideas, even though few seem to fit with the economic challenge of governing today.” No more “abortion-limiting, capital-punishing, immigrant-curbing inclinations,” for example—and even if there were some, everybody knows Stephen Harper would lay an instantaneous smack-down on them anyway. Just lots of little ideas, some affordable, some not, and most of which “would not look out of place on a Liberal party convention floor.” Ouch.

The Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin pulls back the mysterious “cloak” that enshrouds Kevin Lynch, Clerk of the Privy Council, whose power has reached such levels that he can safely be considered the second most powerful man in Ottawa. (Third most powerful if you count Earl McRae.) And that power is raising some disquieting questions, Martin notes, as the ostensibly apolitical PCO “increasingly vets communications and access to information requests and has come under criticism from Information Commissioner Robert Marleau for obstructionism.” The media traditionally has little access to the executive branch of government, Martin notes, and that was fine “in the days when power was less concentrated at the centre.” Today, however, he deems this arrangement “inadequate.”

Continue…

The Lynch Report comes to life: Liveblogging Government Ops investigation into the NAFTA Leak Thing Investigation Investigation

By kadyomalley - Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 9:52 AM - 0 Comments

8:46:41 AM
After a flurry of last-minute changes to the schedule – literally, the most recent was at 7:30 this morning and, for all I know, it’s been rejigged again during the half hour or so it took to make it from my apartment to the Hill. It looks like today’s meeting is going to go into extra innings in order to accommodate a very special witness: PMO chief of staff Ian Brodie, who may or may not have unwittingly (or not so unwittingly) kicked off the whole NAFTA leak debacle by suggesting, during an off the record chat with CTV at the budget lockup, that either the Clinton or the Obama campaign had assured Canada that the anti-trade sabre-rattling by the two leading Democratic candidates was nothing but sound and fury to shore up support.

This, of course, led to the initial CTV report, which attributed the comments to a senior PMO staffer, later identified by ABC as Brodie, which, in turn, seems to have sparked the leak of a not-apparently-all-that-secret confidential memo prepared by Canadian consulate staff for the embassy, which eventually found its way to the Associated Press. The rest, as they say, is history. Well, history that is still happening, anyway. Technically, I think that means it’s “news.”
Continue…

Next we'll find out Kevin Lynch won't be able to make it either.

By kadyomalley - Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 7:23 AM - 0 Comments

UPDATE: Commenter James, of whom I becoming fonder and more appreciative by the moment, points out that the notice has been amended yet again: Ian Brodie – a far from nameless PMO official – is now on the witness list. Undrat! I’m not sure if the time given for his appearance is a typo, however — it says 11:30, but the meeting is only scheduled to go until 11:00, and there’s committee business on the agenda as well.

In any case, ITQ will – of course – be there. We’re leaving right now to get a good seat, in fact. Since it won’t be possible to update this post between now and kickoff, feel free to add any other developments in the comments.

–

As noted by a commenter on the original NAFTA/Obama/Clinton/AP/CTV/PMO/And-Your-Little-Dog-Too Leak Investigation Investigation (no, that’s not a typo) post, it seems that those unnamed senior officials from the Prime Minister’s Office who were listed when the notice first went up this afternoon are no longer there. Drat!

If Kevin Lynch turns out to be a no-show, I say they take the meeting on a road trip across the street to Langevin, and set up a table in the lobby, since that might be the only chance the committee will get to catch up with the overworked and, apparently, wildly overscheduled souls who toil in the bowels of PCO/PMO.

Just in time for the McCain visit …

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, June 18, 2008 at 3:13 PM - 0 Comments

… the Government Operations committee kicks off its investigation into the Lynch report on the NAFTA/Obama/Clinton/CTV/AP/Professor/Mary Ann leak with a star-studded witness list:

Standing Committee on Government Operations and Estimates

Orders of the Day

1.     Study of the “Report on the Investigation Into Unauthorized Disclosure of Sensitive Diplomatic Information”

Witnesses

Office of the Prime Minister of Canada
To be determined

Privy Council Office
Kevin G. Lynch, Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet
Marc Tardif, Director
Security Operations

BMCI Investigations & Security Ltd.
Patrick Cummins, Principal
Allan Bird, Principal

Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (Foreign Affairs)
Paul Meyer, Director General
International Security Bureau

So many questions! Will the Clerk of the Privy Council show up this time? Will we finally learn the identities of PMO Officials One and Two? Will we find out why nobody bothered to interview Frank Sensenbrenner? Tune in tomorrow as ITQ liveblogs the excitement in nearly-real time!

ITQ Committee Update Update: No such thing as a free Lynch

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

.. schedule-wise, that is.
Continue…

Government Ops – Who investigates the NAFTA leak investigator? (These guys do!)

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

11:09:32 AM
After a somewhat haphazard start to the day that involved much strategic scrambling on the part of your humble liveblogger, I managed to make it to Government Operations — with time to spare, even. That’s no small accomplishment, considering I only found out this morning that the committee will be considering a most intriguing motion from Liberal MP Mario Silva. He wants the committee jumpstart its investigation into the Lynch Report, the PCO-authored inquiry into the notorious NAFTA/Obama/Clinton/PMO/CTV/And-A Player-To-Be-Named-Later/Just-Don’t-Call-It-NAFTAGate leak, which may or may not have cost Obama a crucial win in Ohio by implying he wasn’t serious about re-negotiating NAFTA. Of course, since then, Hilary Clinton has dropped out of the race, Obama secured the nomination, and it’s all one big happy Democrat family, except for those possibly mythical angry Clinton supporting women who John McCain is hankering to seduce into voting Republican just to show The Man.

Anyway, Silva is calling on the committee to hold its first hearing on Thursday, just one day before that very same John McCain is scheduled to speak to a Chateau Laurier ballroom-sized crowd on, of all things, free trade. Why is that relevant, you ask? Well, because the suspect list has recently expanded to include Frank Sensenbrenner, Republican operative, Canadaphile, and formerly on contract with the Canadian Embassy in Washington, DC, much to the reported displeasure of the existing staff. According to the Toronto Star’s Jim Travers, Sensenbrenner was foisted onto the embassy by PMO, and was basically treated like Langevin’s spy in DC by all and sundry. Although his name surfaced at the time, he was never interviewed by Lynch’s handpicked detectives, which the opposition finds somewhat suspicious. That’s one reason – among many – why the opposition members want Government Operations to review the report.
Continue…

ITQ Committee Roundup – It's not over til the femme fatale testifies …

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 16, 2008 at 2:04 PM - 0 Comments

… which is why ITQ will be hanging around in the hallway outside the Public Safety committee room, as its members meet behind closed doors later this afternoon to discuss the latest twists and turns in their ongoing investigation into the Bernier/Couillard Affair. During the first day of hearings last week, two senior RCMP officials – Bob Paulson and Raf Souccar -refused to tell the committee whether or not the Mounties had informed the Privy Council Office- that the then-Foreign Affairs Minister’s special friend was, as they say, “known to police.”
Continue…

Memories of Rideau Club-catered Dinners Past

By kadyomalley - Friday, June 6, 2008 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

And to think just a few weeks later, one of these three dining companions would be investigating allegations that another had leaked classified information that may have given a temporary boost to the Democratic candidate favoured by the third.

UPDATE (for comment thread non-readers) : Maybe they were too busy discussing drugs to talk politics at all.  Specifically, “prescription drug policy on taxation and international shipping”, since Gordon Giffin is a registered lobbyist for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (patent, not generic drugs, for anyone who follows that sort of thing). (Note – the link goes to his original registration, which was terminated in April, but he re-filed the next day.)

Travel and Hospitality Expenses – Detailed Report

Hospitality Expense – 2008

For:
Lynch, Kevin, Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet

Event Description:
Working dinner with Gordon Giffin and Ian Brodie

Date(s):
01-22

Attendee(s)
3 (2 Government of Canada employee(s) and 1 Guest(s))

Location:
Catered by Rideau Club

TOTAL:
$255.40

Friday afternoon buck-passing

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 23, 2008 at 4:17 PM - 0 Comments

If you’re wondering what this corner thinks about the Lynch report on Brodie-Odie-O, let me just say it’s almost exactly the same as what these fine bloggers think. The report is a chilling portrait of distractedness, musing, and human fallibility at the highest reaches of government. It’s like a wonky version of “Celebrities… they’re just like us!” from US magazine. Ian Brodie takes the trash out! Ian Brodie can’t get the grocery bags to open properly either! Ian Brodie mishears some Washington gossip and thinks it’s not a big deal when he passes it along!